Multipath Routing to Improve Quality of Service for Video Streaming Over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Providing quality of service (QoS) for real-time multimedia applications such as video streaming in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is an important challenge. MANETs are characterized by lack of fixed infrastructure, dynamic topology, and limited resources that make more difficult multimedia applications transport and run on this networks. To overcome this challenge, video coding techniques combined to multiple routing paths (multipath) is a promising technique for supporting transmission of multiple video streams with appropriate QoS over mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, firstly, many issues and different techniques for video streaming over MANET have been reviewed and secondly two multi paths routing protocols (M-AODV and MDSDV) have been evaluated in order to improve QoS for real-time multimedia applications. Results show that none of these two protocols is better than the other. In certain situations (throughput and load network with high mobility) is M-AODV but in others (network load and reliability for large-scale network) is MDSDV protocol which displays good performance. It is also noted that these two protocols provide between acceptable and good quality and a small jitter regardless of nodes number in medium mobility.