Multipath Video Communication in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks: Framework, Unicast, and Multicast

In this work, we introduce new path diversity schemes in order to provide robustness for both unicast and multicast video communication applications over wireless ad hoc networks. We first propose a general architecture for multipath video streaming over wireless ad hoc networks. Then for the unicast case, we propose multipath streaming with two node-disjoint paths, which have minimum concurrent Packet Drop Probability (PDP) among all path pairs. This approach minimizes the probability of concurrent loss of all the descriptions, thus optimizing the worst case Multiple Description Coding (MDC) video quality over all times. Based on our path selection model, we propose a heuristic PDP aware multipath routing protocol. For the multicast case, we propose multiple tree video multicast with MDC. Specifically, we propose two distributed protocols, Serial Multiple Disjoint Tree Multicast Routing (Serial MDTMR) and Parallel Multiple Nearly-disjoint Trees Multicast Routing (Parallel MNTMR). We show video quality of proposed protocols are significantly higher than that of other protocols, through extensive NS simulations and actual experiments.