Video Transport over Multi Hop Directional Wireless Networks

Exploiting directional antenna technology in wireless networks has become an attractive option because of the potential capacity increase through spatial reuse. Such development apparently has profound impact to wireless multimedia applications. While the advantages of directional transmission in single hop networks (e.g. WLANs and cellular systems) have been evident, it has also been recognized that multi hop directional networks may suffer long transmission delays and frequent link breakages if conventional routing protocols (e.g. AODV and DSR) are used. This is mainly due to the unique feature of directional transmission commonly known as “node deafness”. To address this problem, we propose a multi-path routing scheme which focuses more on minimizing per-hop delays instead of traditional route length. We further propose a differentiated service (DiffServ) framework for layered video transport over multi hop directional network using QoS aware multi-path routing as well as class based queuing (CBQ). Both network layer and application layer simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed video transport scheme over directional networks. 1