Supporting video/image applications in a mobile multihop radio environment using route diversity

This paper investigates the need for multiple path transport (MPT) of video and image information in a multihop mobile radio network. The video and image information is encoded non-hierarchically into a multiple description coding (MDC) with the following objectives. The received picture quality should be acceptable even if only one description is received and every additional received description contributes to enhanced picture quality. Typical applications will need a higher bandwidth/higher reliability connection than that provided by current mobile networks. For supporting these applications a mobile node may need to set up and use multiple paths to the desired destination either simply because of the lack of raw bandwidth on a single channel or because of its poor error characteristics which reduces its effective throughput. In the context of this work, the principal reasons describe a protocol architecture that addresses this need and with the help of simulations, we demonstrate the feasibility of this system and compare the performance of the MDC-MPT scheme to that of a hierarchical coding scheme.