CINAPS: A Scalable Solution for VoD over WLANs Using Application-Friendly Association Control

In recent years, the delivery of video-on-demand (VoD) applications to mobile users has gained increasing attention by the wireless communication industry. In this paper, we introduce a scalable VoD system operating over 802.11 networks, namely CINAPS (Cluster of INexpensive Access PointS), in which collocated commodity Access Points (APs) work in no-overlapping channels orchestrated by the Wireless Channel Manager (WCM), a central unit that performs association control of clients to the APs. Key to CINAPS’ scalable performance is the support to two novel application-friendly heuristics we developed, namely Early Released First (ERF) and Bounded ERF (BERF) for association control that guarantee minimum bandwidth through effective reservation mechanisms. The main insight behind ERF and BERF is to exploit the slack of time aka the patience factor that VoD applications provide, to allow the association control unit to accept future requests for using the communication channels. Our simulated results showed that CINAPS outperformed our previous design that used a standard LLF (Least Loaded First) heuristic with minimum bandwidth guarantees, by decreasing significantly the overall blockage rate of