Control based mobile ad-hoc networks for video communications

This paper presents a feedback control scheme for transmission of video signals over mobile ad-hoc channels. The scheme is a combination of cross-layer (local) feedback and receiver feedback. The receiver feedback is based on the real time transport control protocol (RTCP), which is designed to provide an end-to-end feedback assessment of multihop transmission channels by tracking packet receptions in synchronization with the video frame rate. The control packet carries an overlapping bit-pattern in order to cope with losses on the reverse link. Assisting the receiver feedback is a local feedback, which aims at controlling the packet transmission flow with respect to the ad-hoc routing characteristics. The combined feedback scheme, together with a bitrate control and packet-loss compensation strategy, have been shown to be very effective in improving the ad-hoc network reliability for transmission of H.264/RTP/UDP/IP packets over multihop fading channels.