Towards a location and mobility-aware routing protocol for improving multimedia streaming performance in MANETs

The increasing availability and decreasing cost of mobile devices equipped with WiFi radios has led to increasing demand for multimedia applications in both professional and entertainment contexts. The streaming of multimedia however requires strict adherence to QoS levels in order to guarantee suitable quality for end users. MANETs lack the centralised control, coordination and infrastructure of wireless networks as well as presenting a further element of complexity in the form of device mobility. Such constraints make achieving suitable QoS a nontrivial challenge and much work has already been presented in this area. This paper proposes a bottom-up routing protocol which specifically takes into account mobility and other unique characteristics of MANETs in order to improve QoS for multimedia streaming. Geographic Predictive Routing (GPR) uses Artificial Neural Networks to accurately predict the future locations of neighbouring devices for making location and mobility-aware routing decisions. GPR is intended as the first step towards creating a fully QoS-aware networking framework for enhancing the performance of multimedia streaming in MANETs. Simulation results comparing GPR against well-established ad-hoc routing protocols such as AODV and DSR show that GPR is able to achieve an improved level of QoS in a variety of multimedia and mobility scenarios.