A QoS-aware routing protocol with adaptive feedback scheme for video streaming for mobile networks

One of the major challenges for the transmission of time-sensitive data like video over mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is the deployment of an end-to-end QoS support mechanism. Therefore, several approaches and enhancements have been proposed concerning the routing protocols. In this paper we propose a new QoS routing protocol based on AODV (named AQA-AODV), which creates routes according to application QoS requirements. We have introduced link and path available bandwidth estimation mechanisms and an adaptive scheme that can provide feedback to the source node about the current network state, to allow the application to appropriately adjust the transmission rate. In the same way, we propose a route recovery approach into the AQA-AODV protocol, which provides a mechanism to detect the link failures in a route and re-establish the connections taking into account the conditions of QoS that have been established during the previous route discovery phase. The simulation results reveal performance improvements in terms of packet delay, number of link failures and connection setup latency while we make more efficient use of the available bandwidth than other protocols like AODV and QAODV. In terms of video transmission, the obtained results prove that the combined use of AQA-AODV and the scalable video coding provides an efficient platform for supporting rate-adaptive video streaming.