Support of packet video over ad hoc wireless networks

In a wireless ad hoc network, packets are sent from node to node in a multihop fashion until they reach the destination. In this paper we investigate the capacity of a wireless ad hoc network in supporting packet video transport. We study an ad hoc network consisting of n homogeneous video users with each of them also serving as a relay node for other users. We will quantitatively study how the effective video throughput and the resulting delivered video quality are affected by the distance between the source and destination, measured as the number of hops required for a packet to reach the destination from the source. The results indicate that appropriate video coding rate control has to be employed in order to efficiently utilize the network capacity while avoiding packet loss as the number of hops between source and destination changes.