Improving interactive video in ad-hoc networks using path diversity

We propose a mechanism that combines retransmission-based error control with path diversity, to provide different levels of protection to interactive video in ad-hoc networks. The mechanism factors in the importance of the retransmitted packets to the reconstructed video quality as well as the end-to-end latency constraints to minimize the overhead and maximize the reconstructed video quality at the receiver. Simulation results show that the proposed retransmission mechanism maintains the video quality under different loss rates and with less overhead compared to error control methods that depend on controlling the intra-update rate. In addition, the mechanism is shown to be more robust to wireless losses than schemes that combine layered coding with path diversity.