On Routing Web and Multimedia Traffic in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

We evaluate the capabilities of MANETs in supporting multiple, simultaneous HTTP and multimedia streaming flows. The HTTP traffic is produced by several Web servers, each responding to a series of concurrent requests from multiple Web clients, and multimedia traffic is modelled as a variable bit-rate stream consisting of UDP packets. To see the impact of a routing protocol, we consider two on-demand (AODV and DSR) and one adaptive proactive (ADV) routing protocols. We also consider the impact of a previously proposed TCP-sender heuristic, fixed RTO, on HTTP performance. Our results indicate that ADV performs well relative to the on-demand techniques, providing higher throughput for variable bit rate UDP traffic and significantly reducing the time required to complete Web client-server transactions. Furthermore, our results show that, compared to TCP Reno alone, the fixed RTO technique yields significant gains in the HTTP performance of the two on-demand algorithms.