Joint routing and server selection for multiple description video streaming in ad hoc networks

Multiple description (MD) coding has a great potential for multimedia communications in wireless ad hoc networks. In this paper, we study the important problem of joint routing and server selection for MD video in ad hoc networks. We take a cross-layer approach to formulate the task as a combinatorial optimization problem and present tight lower and upper bounds for the achievable distortion. The upper bound also provides a feasible solution to the formulated problem. Our extensive numerical results show that the bounds are very close to each other for all the cases studied, indicating the near-global optimality of the derived upper bounding solution. Moreover, we observe significant gains in video quality achieved by the proposed approach over existing server selection schemes. This justifies the importance of jointly considering routing and server selection for optimal MD video streaming in wireless ad hoc networks. The proposed algorithms are computationally efficient and can be easily incorporated into existing routing protocols.