Qoe-based performance evaluation of video transmission using the BATMAN routing protocol

Abstract

Video communications has become one of the most demanded services among end users. Furthermore, telcos forecast a great growth of this kind of transmissions during the next years, representing the majority of total Internet traffic. The strict requirements of multimedia services pose a great challenge to beat in order to provide acceptable levels of quality; even more in wireless systems, whose inherent characteristics difficult the achievement of the desired multimedia quality. Regarding wireless accessing, Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs) are receiving a great attention due to its ease-of-deployment and decentralized architecture. The dynamic nature of these networks adds further issues for the quality provisioning of video services. For that reason, efficient ad-hoc routing protocols are needed. In this work, we evaluate the performance of the proactive routing protocol BATMAN supporting video traffic over different mesh topologies. Using computer simulation, we compare the results obtained with BATMAN with those attained for the extended and well-known routing protocol OLSR. From the results, we conclude that BATMAN presents more robustness than OLSR against the impairments introduced by the wireless medium for video transmission. However, BATMAN presents some scalability issues compared to OLSR. We show that BATMAN can be improved in terms of scalability with a proper tuning of the control-packets flooding interval.