A Low-Latency Video Streaming with Congestion Control in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Claudio Greco (1) , M. Cagnazzo (1) , Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu (1)

1 LTCI - Laboratoire Traitement et Communication de l'Information

In this paper, we address the delivery of a video stream, encoded in multiple descriptions, in a mobile ad-hoc environment, while dealing with low-latency constraints. This kind of application is meant to provide an efficient and reliable video communication tool in scenarios where the deployment of an infrastructure is not feasible, such as military and disaster relief applications. Therefore, we first present a recently proposed protocol, which employs a reliable form of one-hop broadcast to build an efficient network overlay according to an objective function aimed to minimise the number of packets injected in the network and to maximise the path diversity among descriptions. Then, we introduce the main contribution of this article, a cross-layer congestion control strategy, where the MAC layer is video-coding aware and adjusts its transmission parameters (namely, the RTS retry limit) via Lagrangian optimisation of congestion and distortion. The main challenge in this approach consists in providing a reliable estimation of congestion and distortion, given the limited information available at each node. Our simulations show that, if a stringent constraint of low delay is imposed, our technique grants a consistent gain, in terms both of PSNR and of delay reduction, for bitrates up to a few megabits per second.

Keywords: Congestion-Distortion Model; Cooperative Systems; Cross-layer Design; Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks; Multiple Description Coding; Multimedia Communication

Domains: Multimedia [cs.MM]

Claudio Greco, M. Cagnazzo, Beatrice Pesquet-Popescu. A Low-Latency Video Streaming with Congestion Control in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2012, 14 (4), pp.1337-1350. ⟨hal-00802368⟩