Performance of H.264 compressed video streams over 802.11b based MANETs

We address the problem of video streams transmission in 802.11b based mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Through the study of the delivery of a live encoded video stream, we expose the characteristics of different routing protocols and the infeasibility to provide QoS. The analysis shows the impact of a MANET on H.264 real-time video flows in terms of packet loss, end-to-end delay, jitter and distortion, and the behavior of H.264 error resilience tools in order to determine their effectiveness on such network scenarios. The results show that video traffic has demands that are hard to be met by a standard MANET, and that improvements are required in terms of routing protocols and QoS provisioning either on the MAC layer or at IP level using traffic shaping tools. Also, most of H.264 error resilience tools are not so effective as expected with this kind of networks, being the random macroblock updating the most effective one we have tested.