摘要：P2P based live streaming applications are growing up rapidly. However, when extending them to WLANs, the bandwidth bottleneck and the high rate of packet loss are usually the major stumbling blocks. To overcome this issue, a new wireless multicast agent mechanism (WiMA) based on the IP multicast scheme for buffer management and scheduling is proposed. First of all, a wireless agent selection method is presented to choose an appropriate agent for WiMA. Then this agent gains media data by interacting with wired neighbor peers as a common P2P node, and transmits these data to other wireless peers in the WLAN by means of multicast pushing and multicast patching. A normal wireless peer requests data according to the strategy of "emergent ones first". Experimental results show that the approach proposed can significantly save bandwidth in WLANs with acceptable start delay and satisfied playing continuity.
