The Idea

Challenge:

In some stadiums, sports fans can view personal video feeds through their mobile devices. However, it is difficult to guarantee the reception reliability of these devices because each user experiences different wireless channel conditions.

Solution:

Take advantage of the multiplicity of radios on modern devices and their physical proximity in a stadium to allow cooperative packet recovery over a secondary network.

• Wireless devices are connected to the principal network (WiMAX) to receive broadcast data such as live video feeds

• A wireless device may lose some of the data sent over the principal network

• Physically co-located wireless devices form an assistant network over WiFi to recover the lost data cooperatively from their peers

Experiment Design

Step 1: Choose the application that you want to run on the WiMAX nodes (or create a new one)

In this case, we are running a Python application that we've written ourselves, called coopshim, that does the P2P cooperative recovery. We're also running the OML enabled version of VLC to stream a video over the WiMAX network (i.e., the video feed that we are hoping to recover).

A number of already-OMLized applications are ​already available.

Step 2: If you've written your own application, instrument it with OML so that you can collect measurements from it during experiment runtime

The coopshim and VLC applications were instrumented with the ​Python OML client module and the OML ​C or C++ library, respectively.

Experiment Execution

A ​Ruby gem is also available.