Performance analysis of MANET routing protocols for multimedia traffic

Providing requisite Quality of service (QoS) guarantees in wireless multi-hop networks is much more challenging than in wired networks. This is mainly due to its dynamic topology, distributed nature, interference, multi-hop communication and contention for channel access. In particular, it is important for routing protocols to provide QoS guarantees by incorporating metrics like achievable throughput, delay, jitter, packet loss ratio, etc. In this paper, we present comparative analysis of mobile ad-hoc routing protocols over real time video streaming. Our analysis exploits the built-in support for real time multimedia streaming in MANETs. We use H.264/SVC encoded video sequences to evaluate the performance of various routing protocols over a large number of scenarios in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay. Effects of changes in mobility, network scalability and network load are evaluated and presented. Our results show that it is possible to stream some multimedia applications with acceptable quality over MANETs within limited mobility, QoS and network size.