When wireless hosts use different rates to transmit data in IEEE 802.11 networks, it will take on the state of performance anomaly which will severely decrease the throughputs of all the higher rate hosts. Hence, it is bad for video service transmission. Considering that video is very sensitive to packet delivery delay but can tolerate some packet losses, we propose a novel cross-layer scheme which takes these two characteristics into consideration. Firstly, the maximum number of retransmissions for a video Medium Access Control (MAC) frame is computed in MAC layer according to video frame rate requirement of application layer and current access delay of MAC layer. Secondly, within the margin of the tolerant Packet Loss Rate (PLR) of application layer, several video MAC frames are allowed to drop so that we can adaptively select the transmission rate as high as possible for the rest of video MAC frames in terms of current channel quality and the maximum number of retransmissions. Experiment results show that the proposed method can reduce the delay and jitter of video service and improve the throughputs of fast hosts. Therefore, it increases the quality of reconstructed video to a certain extent and relieves the performance anomaly of network effectively.
