Cisco Wi-Fi software makes video more reliable over wireless
Cisco Systems Inc. Tuesday announced software for its Wi-Fi products to improve video performance, reliability and scaling on 802.11n wireless networks. The new code, dubbed VideoStream, compensates for Wi-Fi weaknesses that degrade video quality as the number of streams and clients grow.
VideoStream makes three changes in handling video traffic, according to Cisco. First, it takes a new approach to video multicasting to clients, making the streams more reliable, and using bandwidth more efficiently. Second, it can assign different priorities to individual streams, so a video by the company president gets a higher priority than a clip from a sports broadcast. Finally, it can block new video requests if they will cause video quality for the new request, or for the overall network, to erode.
