Multimedia Ad Hoc Networks: Performance Analysis

Wireless ad hoc networks are characterized by frequent topology changes, unreliable wireless channel, network congestion and resource contention. Multimedia applications usually are bandwidth hungry with stringent delay, jitter and loss requirements. Designing ad hoc networks which support multimedia applications, hence, is considered a hard task. In this paper, we report our work on supporting video streaming over ad hoc networks and present the analysis using the OPNET simulation environment. We briefly survey the main challenges in ad hoc network research and review the QoS literature for ad hoc networks. We then evaluate performance of video streaming application over ad hoc networks by simulating few scenarios with varying video quality, different network sizes, and 5 different routing protocols. The simulations demonstrate that it is possible to stream fairly good quality video over medium sized ad hoc networks.