Multipath routing for multiple description video communications over wireless mesh networks

During the past few years, wireless mesh networks have drawn significant attention from academia and industry as a fast, easy, and inexpensive solution for broadband wireless access. In WMNs it is important to support video communications in an efficient way. To address this issue, this article studies the multipath routing for multiple description video delivery over IEEE 802.11-based WMNs. Specifically, we first design a framework to transmit MD video over WMNs through multiple paths. We then investigate the technical challenges encountered in the framework. To overcome these challenges, we develop an enhanced version of a guaranteed rate packet scheduling algorithm, virtual reserved rate GR, to shorten the packet delay of video communications in multiservice network environments. Our simulation study shows that the proposed approach can reduce the latency of video delivery and achieve good performance of traffic engineering across a WMN.