The increasing spread of mobile nodes along with the technical advances in multi-hop MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks) make this kind of networks an important type of access network of next generation. The demand of multimedia services from these networks is expected to significantly grow in the next years. Multimedia services, though, require the provision of Quality of Service (QoS). Nevertheless, the highly dynamic nature of MANETs, the energy constraints, the lack on centralized infrastructure and the variable link capacity, makes the QoS provision over MANETs a matter that challenges attention. These features make self-configuration and system adaptation questions of major importance when developing a QoS-aware framework. To tackle this issue, we have designed a-MMDSR (adaptive-Multipath Multimedia Dynamic Source Routing), a multipath routing protocol able to self-configure dynamically depending on the state of the network. The approach includes cross-layer techniques especially designed to improve the end-to-end performance of video-streaming services over IEEE 802.11e Ad Hoc networks. Besides, a straightforward analytical model to estimate the path error probability is presented. This model is used by the routing scheme to estimate the lifetime of the paths. In this way, proper proactive decisions can be made before the paths get broken. The model simplicity is appropriate for low capacity wireless devices. Simulation results validate the proposal and show the improvement on standard DSR (Dynamic Source Routing) and on a previous static version.
End-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) provision to video-streaming applications over Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) poses a specially challenging problem. In this paper we propose a Cross-Layer (XL) network architecture design to optimize the overall performance of video-streaming services over MANETs, called ViStA-XL. The idea relies on applying several optimization strategies to different network layers in a holistic way. In our proposal, a real-time XL Optimizer (XLO) collects information about the node and network states from different layers of the network's protocol stack. Then, in order to minimize the error between received and transmitted video, the XLO module takes the necessary decisions to act dynamically over different layers' parameters. In addition, our proposal exploits path diversity as a mean to reinforce QoS provision to layered-coded video-streaming applications, by protecting the most important video information packets. To show the advantages of our approach, we have developed an algorithm based on ViStA-XL. Simulation results show that our proposed network design can improve the performance of videostreaming transmissions over MANETs in spite of frequent changes in network topology and node's conditions.
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