Improving real-time video streaming delivery over dense multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

The growing popularity of mobile devices equipped with wireless interface makes Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) become an interesting architecture for rapid deployment of related applications without relying on any infrastructure. When the MANET is dense, and the source is located more than one hop away from the destination, providing delivery ratios that meet real-time video streaming constraints is still an open issue. One problem is that video traffic flow tends to be continuous, thus creating interferences on its own route that impede the retransmissions by the forwarding nodes and cause loss of packets. We propose a strategy which consists in delaying periodically the transmissions at the source, thus allowing the forwarding nodes to retransmit to destination. The evaluations show that, in most cases, this strategy leads to improvements of more than 30% in the delivery of video packets between communicating pairs located two or three hops away, without exceeding the video streaming end-to-end delay constraint.