Performance evaluation of videostreaming on a heterogenous multihop mobile network

Recent wireless technologies have enough bandwidth to support even demanding applications such as multimedia transmissions. Quite often, mobile networks have wireless routers using different technologies and characteristics (heterogenous networks). The paper describes our implementation experiences in constructing a multihop heterogenous mobile network using Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11b. We measured packet latency and throughput of the network and subjective video quality when using a videoconferencing application. Videoconferencing over IP (VCoIP) is known to have rather strict bandwidth and latency requirements. Our results indicate that it is possible to use VCoIP, but, depending on the link technologies used, the quality of service can be severely degraded.