Video transport over multi-hop directional wireless networks: Research Articles

Exploiting directional antenna technology in wireless networks has become an attractive option for multimedia applications because of the potential capacity increase through spatial reuse. However, it has also been recognized that multi-hop directional networks may suffer long transmission delays and frequent link breakages if conventional routing protocols (e.g., AODV and DSR) are used. This is mainly caused by ‘node deafness’ in directional transmission. To address this problem, we propose a multi-path routing scheme which focuses more on minimizing per-hop delays instead of traditional route length. In this paper, an analytical and numerical analysis of link breakages in multi-hop directional network is presented, along with an introduction to our multi-path routing scheme and two implementations based on AODV and DSR protocols. We further propose a differentiated service (DiffServ) framework for layered video transport over multi-hop directional network using QoS aware multi-path routing. Both network layer and application layer simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed video transport scheme over directional networks. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.