Mitigating the impact of mobility on H.264 real-time video streams using multiple paths

One of the main problems associated with MANETs is that mobility and the associated route discovery and maintenance procedures of reactive routing protocols cause severe interruptions on real-time video streams. Some of these interruptions are too large to be concealed using any sort of video technology, resulting in communications breaks unpleasant for the final end user. We present a solution for enhanced video transmission that increases route stability by using an improved route discovery process based on the DSR routing protocol, along with traffic splitting algorithms and a preventive route discovery mechanism. We also present some video adaptative mechanisms that improve the overall performance of multipath routing in terms of video data replication and video packet splitting strategies. Combining our proposals, we achieve up to 97% less interruptions on communication with high mobility and over 1.2 dB of improvements in terms of video distortion.