Intelligent Stale-Frame Discards for Real-Time Video Streaming over Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

This paper presents intelligent early packet discards (I-EPD) for real-time video streaming over a multihop wireless ad hoc network. In a multihop wireless ad hoc network, the quality of transferring real-time video streams could be seriously degraded, since every intermediate node (IN) functionally like relay device does not possess large buffer and sufficient bandwidth. Even worse, a selected relay node could leave or power off unexpectedly, which breaks the route to destination. Thus, a stale video frame is useless even if it can reach destination after network traffic becomes smooth or failed route is reconfigured. In the proposed I-EPD, an IN can intelligently determine whether a buffered video packet should be early discarded. For the purpose of validation, we implement the I-EPD on Linux-based embedded systems. Via the comparisons of performance metrics (packet/frame discards ratios, PSNR, etc.), we demonstrate that video quality over a wireless ad hoc network can be substantially improved and unnecessary bandwidth wastage is greatly reduced. Copyright (C) 2009 T.-L. Sheu and Y.-S. Chi.