Video streaming over Bluetooth

Abstract

In recent years, multimedia content has become more accessible to mobile phone devices increasing the demand for multimedia services. Streaming video to or from mobile phones over mobile phone operator networks is one option. In this paper we report on the result of a study which analyzes the suitability of using the Bluetooth network as a last hop network for streaming video to and from mobile phone devices. A number of studies have been reported in the literature, simulating video streaming over Bluetooth. However, few field studies have been reported fuelling the need to build an implementation infrastructure to conduct an empirical study using mobile phone devices, in video streaming applications. In our study we have implemented a testbed comprising a Linux-based Bluetooth video-streaming gateway and a Nokia mobile phone device to stream video clips and real-time video to and from the mobile phone over a Bluetooth connection, using both pre-recorded video and real-time streams from the mobile phone's onboard video camera. The testbed allows various Bluetooth network protocols and parameters to be tested in our framework. The work carried out reinforces the impor-tance of adequate packetization, which proved to be beneficial even with higher protocol layers such as the L2CAP protocol. The data throughputs achieved using Bluetooth v1.1 and Bluetooth v2.0 adapters were also compared and the effect of Wi-Fi interference proved to be detrimental to the performance of the Bluetooth network's data throughput. The use of L2CAP and RFCOMM sockets were compared, highlighting the importance of the choice of an adequate protocol. Video quality degradation at different distances when transferring video over Bluetooth was measured in terms of the mean square error metric. It was shown that the mobile phone device is indeed a resource constrained device and special care must be taken to ensure working streaming-video solutions over Blue-tooth.