Robust Demand-Driven Video Multicast over Ad hoc Wireless Networks

In this paper, we address the problem of video multicasting in ad hoc wireless networks. The salient characteristics of video traffic make conventional multicasting protocols perform quite poorly, hence warranting application-centric approaches in order to increase robustness to packet losses and lower the overhead. By exploiting the path-diversity and the error resilience properties of multiple description coding (MDC), we propose a robust demand-driven video multicast routing (RDVMR) protocol. Our protocol uses a novel path based Steiner tree heuristic to reduce the number of forwarders in each tree, and constructs multiple trees in parallel with reduced number of common nodes among them. Moreover, unlike other on-demand multicast protocols, RDVMR specifically attempts to reduce the periodic (non on-demand) control traffic. We extensively evaluate RDVMR in the NS2 simulation framework and show that it outperforms existing single-tree and two-tree multicasting protocols.