Buffering Techniques to Enhance the Multimedia Streaming Quality Over Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Multimedia streaming over Ad Hoc networks has recently gained significant attention due to the highly scalable, self-starting, self-managing, self-healing and infrastructure-free nature of these networks. In Ad Hoc networks, data packets are transmitted from the source to the destination through multiple intermediate nodes using distributed multi-hop communication. At each intermediate node, packets experience varying buffering delays before being forwarded to the next hop. Furthermore, intermediate nodes may require a random number of retransmission attempts before successfully forwarding packets. Consequently, some packets may arrive at the destination earlier than preceding packets, some may be dropped, and others may arrive later than subsequent packets, leading to packet reordering at the destination. This issue becomes more critical in multimedia streaming applications based on the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), where stale packets are discarded to maintain real-time delivery. As a result, the effective throughput between the transport layer and the application layer decreases, thereby degrading the quality of multimedia streaming. To address these challenges, this paper proposes two novel buffering algorithms: the Static Reordering Buffer (SRB) and the Improved Reordering Buffer (IRB) algorithms. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated using the QualNet 6.1 network simulator with the objective of improving multimedia streaming quality in Ad Hoc networks.