Corrective actions at the application level for streaming video in wifi ad hoc networks

Abstract

Efficient video streaming in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a challenging problem due to the dynamic nature of the network that leads to high bit error rates, unpredictable delay, jitter, throughput and packet delivery ratios and frequent short, intermittent and long-term link failures. Despite the MANET research community's efforts, there are still open problems. For example, protocols and mechanisms that hide these issues to the video streaming applications users are still in early stages. However, these applications must tolerate transparently the dynamic behavior of the network and be able to progress in presence of disconnections. In practice, this is the exception rather the rule. In this paper, we present a multilayer cooperative solution to detect disconnections and reconnections between a video streaming server and a client and we propose corrective actions at the application level. With our transparent approach to the user, the video streaming sessions can tolerate frequent long and short disconnections and use more efficiently the shared wireless bandwidth.