Telecommun Syst DOI 10.1007/s11235-011-9533-1 WEVCast: wireless eavesdropping video casting architecture to overcome standard multicast transmission in Wi-Fi networks Pasquale Pace · Gianluca Aloi © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Service providers and popular applications are ac- tively focused on delivering of video service to consumers over an all IP infrastructure but they rarely care about how contents are really delivered to end users. Services and applications are mostly designed to be enjoyed trough a generic broadband connection even if Wi-Fi is widely seen as the preferred access network to interconnect consumer devices. Wi-Fi has largely been optimized for unicast con- nections but has insufficient bandwidth to support a large number of video streams; on the other hand, multicast over Wi-Fi suffers from several well-known problems such as low data rate, high losses and unfairness respect to other contending unicast transmissions and the multimedia con- tent delivery could be a stumbling block for providers and consumers alike. With the aim to develop a new solution that makes Wi-Fi video distribution more feasible and cost-effective, we pro- pose a new mechanism, called WEVCast (Wireless Eaves- dropping Video Casting), to improve multicast transmission of video contents over standard Wi-Fi networks. We imple- mented a quite realistic simulation framework and we eval- uated the performance of our solution taking into account the perceived video quality experimented by end users. The obtained results confirm that the proposed strategy is very simple, robust, scalable and extremely compatible with all off-the-shelf wireless devices since our main goal was the Wi-Fi standard compliance. P. Pace ( ) · G. Aloi Department of Electronics, Computer and System Sciences (DEIS), University of Calabria, Via P. Bucci 42C, Rende 87036, Italy e-mail: ppace@deis.unical.it G. Aloi e-mail: aloi@deis.unical.it Keywords Multimedia content delivery · Wireless multicast · Perceived quality of service · Quality of experience 1 Introduction The rapid increase of low-priced, multimedia capable mo- bile devices and ubiquitous broadband network connec- tions are fueling the request for multimedia streaming ser- vices and applications. This is palpable observing the huge number of popular web sites that propose multimedia con- tents expressly designed for streaming applications. In many cases, end user terminals access these multimedia streams using Wi-Fi networks since hotspot are proliferating through deployments by service providers as well as through a large use in home and enterprise environments [1, 2]. However, the increase in the number of content viewers, along with the growing number of other online applications, has made this technology ineffective because of bandwidth limitation issues. Multicast streaming is an alternate option in view- ing TV programs and other video contents using Internet and bypassing traditional broadcast networks such as terres- trial, cable and satellite. Meanwhile, the current quality of streamed multimedia content, in general, and video in par- ticular still needs a great deal of improvement before video on the Internet can be accepted by the masses as an alterna- tive to television viewing. This modern trend has been confirmed by a recent en- terprise traffic study [3] in which 5–10% of all payload bytes were attributed to multicast streaming, thus, multi- casting video instead of streaming individually each video flow results in a much more efficient use of the shared wire- less medium since, existing networking systems, are not pre- pared to optimize resources and the quality level of currently