A Protocol for Interactive Streaming of Image-Based Scenes over Wireless Ad-hoc Networks

Mobile computing devices with communication capabilities such as PDAs and cell phones are very popular and can be used as an ad-hoc network to interconnect users and services. The visualization of 3D scenes has many interesting applications, for instance, virtual guide, virtual mall, gaming, training, and monitoring. In this paper we focus on how to merge these technologies to stream interactive virtual environments to remote thin clients over ad-hoc networks, while minimizing the overhead. Mobile ad hoc networks poses significant challenges to multimedia streaming, mainly due to the mobility induced changes in bandwidth. We propose a protocol for interactive streaming of image-based rendered scenes which, different from the traditional geometry rendering schemes, is based on images to render photo-realistic views, that proved to be very suitable for such mobile devices. We also propose an image-based representation of 3D scenes and its packetization scheme, and a feedback mechanism to adapt the traffic to the frequent changes in bandwidth, and thus improving the performance of our streaming system. Besides presenting our proposed interactive streaming system, we also discuss the results of the simulation experiments.