Multimedia Transmissions over a MANET Testbed: Problems and Issues

A set of wireless mobile terminals, which cooperate by routing packets to each other create a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET). MANETs are attracting attention for their potential use in several fields such as collaborative computing and disaster recovery environments. Considering mobility of the terminals, the routes change dynamically and routing becomes a key process for operation of MANETs. Until now we considered only the Constant Bit Rate (CBR) transmission over UDP transport protocol in our test bed. In this paper, we analyse the performance of our MANET test bed in an indoor environment considering multimedia transmissions with variable packet rate. Using linear and mesh topologies for connecting the nodes, and BATMAN routing protocol, we measure throughput, delay and packet loss metrics.