QoS-aware routing for transmission of H.264/SVC encoded video traffic over MANETs

Efficient and reliable video streaming over mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is a challenging task due to the varying characteristics of wireless networks and video traffic. Therefore, these kinds of applications require quality-of-service (QoS) support. Although, many QoS provisioning solutions are reported in the past but none of them are tested on video traffic and also affects of mobility and variations in link quality are not addressed properly. In this paper, we proposed an efficient QoS-aware routing protocol (QARP) which uses the cross-layer communication (CLC) and session admission control (SAC) methods to provide QoS guarantees in terms of network bandwidth. In QARP, we perform QoS-aware route discovery by considering the effects of both inter-contention and intra-contention during the route discovery phase. Only data sessions for which a route with required bandwidth is discovered are admitted into the network by our SAC process. Existing periodic message structures are extended for exchange the QoS states of nodes to minimize the affect of mobility in our QoS-aware routing method. Furthermore, two methods are proposed to handle the QoS violations caused by dynamic characteristics of video traffic and network mobility during data communication. To stress the network with real time multimedia traffic, we use trace files generated from real time video files that are encoded using H.264/SVC encoder.