Transport protocol testing in wireless multimedia streaming environment: Bachelor's Thesis

The objective of this thesis was to carry out a performance evaluation between UDP and UDP Lite. The UDP measurements were performed in the wireless 802.11b environment using MPEG-4 audiovisual streams and the theoretical performance analysis were made for the UDP Lite. The transport protocol test environment, i.e. testbed, was build for performing the measurements in an equal environment. A software was developed to produce measurement results for the analysis. As a result, the performance analysis proved that UDP Lite provides a more efficient way to transport coded audiovisual content over the error-prone networks than UDP. The used parameters were the throughput and packet loss at the transport layer and the jitter between sequential packets. One of the comparisons was the packet loss probability at different BER values. The theoretical part of the thesis concentrates on describing the multimedia streaming architecture, technologies, protocols and standards, which handle the higher level tasks. The underlying network architecture, which is constructed of the layered infrastructure for data transportation, is also covered; including the network access technologies.