Application-level QoS assessment of continuous media multicasting in a wireless ad hoc network

This paper assesses the application-level QoS of live audio and video multicasting in a wireless ad hoc network. We regard the quality of media synchronization as the major part of the application-level QoS. We also investigate the inter-destination synchronization quality of three schemes: the master-slave destination scheme, the synchronization maestro scheme, and the distributed control scheme. The inter-destination synchronization adjusts the output timing among destinations in a multicast group. We perform computer simulation with a string topology network. In the simulation, a source terminal multicasts the media streams to six destinations by using ODMRP (on-demand multicast routing protocol), which is a multicast routing protocol for ad hoc networks. The simulation result shows that the master-slave destination scheme, which sends smaller numbers of control packets for inter-destination synchronization control than the other two schemes, provides higher quality of application-level QoS; however, the QoS of this scheme is sensitive to the location of the master destination. When it is difficult to find an appropriate destination for the master, the synchronization maestro scheme can be the second best choice.