Routing-aware multiple description video coding over wireless ad-hoc networks using multiple paths

Supporting video transmission over error-prone wireless ad-hoc networks is becoming increasingly important as these networks become more widely deployed. In this paper, we propose a routing-aware multiple description video coding approach to support video transmission over wireless ad-hoc networks with path diversity. Our method uses the standard ad-hoc routing messages to estimate the possible packet losses in the networks and dynamically selects reference frames in order to alleviate error propagation caused by packet losses. We conducted experiments using the QualNet simulator that accounts for node mobility, channel properties, MAC operation, multipath routing, and traffic type. The results demonstrate that our proposed method provides up to 2.3 dB gains in PSNR and significantly improves the perceptual video quality for multiple users.