An Opportunistic Transmission Mechanism
for Seamless Video Streaming
in the MIMO-capable Wireless Ad Hoc Network
Hayoung Oh
Soongsil University
School of Electronic Engineering
Seoul, Korea
hyoh@ssu.ac.kr
Abstract The Multiple Inputs Multiple Output (MIMO) antenna
technique provides two transmission modes, MUX and DIV. The
MUX mode increases data rate and, on the other hand, the DIV mode
reliability or transmission range. In this paper, we propose an
opportunistic transmission mechanism that adaptively changes the
MIMO transmission mode to provide reliability for the seamless
video streaming service. Also, our mechanism utilizes an extra detour
path for resolving congestion. We aim to satisfy various QoS
requirements of multi-priority video data packets by assigning
different paths and MIMO modes to different priority packets.
Thanks to the low overhead of a single detour path and the
opportunistic MIMO transmission mode change, our proposed
mechanism becomes a proper solution for the seamless video
streaming service. By carrying out extensive simulations, we show
that our mechanism improves the network throughput.1
Keywords MIMO, Wireless Ad Hoc Network, Seamless Video
Streaming, Multipath Routing
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the Multiple Input Multiple Output
(MIMO) becomes one of the popular technologies for wireless
communications. The MIMO antenna technique provides two
options of operation: (a) to transmit different data
simultaneously by using multi-antennas for the increase of data
rate, called the Spatial Multiplexing (MUX), and (b) to transmit
the same data simultaneously by using multi-antennas for the
increase of the reliability or the transmission range, called the
Spatial Diversity (DIV) [1].
If the MIMO MUX mode is used for packet transmission,
the network throughput can be improved. However, it is also
possible that a node may get overwhelmed (congested) by the
packets from its neighbors using the MUX mode. If we
consider the multi-source network environment, this congestion
problem can get even severe. Since lots of connections are set
up in a network, wireless links located at the center of the
*
Corresponding Author: Sanghyun Ahn, ahn@uos.ac.kr
1
This research was supported by the MSIP (Ministry of Science, ICT
and Future Planning), Korea, under the ITRC (Information
Technology Research Center) support program (NIPA-2014-H0301-
14-1015) supervised by the NIPA (National ICT Industry Promotion
Agency).
978-1-4799-3494-2/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE
Sanghyun Ahn*, Yang Cheng
University of Seoul
School of Computer Science
Seoul, Korea
*ahn@uos.ac.kr,cy00002009@gmail.com
network may carry more traffic and easily get congested. The
congestion problem affects the performance of the entire
network in terms of delay and throughput.
The multipath scheme can improve network reliability in
case of link disconnection of an active route. The multipath
routing approach is much more robust than the single path
routing scheme and requires less cost for the alternate route
discovery. The Ad hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector
(AOMDV) [2], an extension of the Ad hoc On-Demand
Distance Vector (AODV) [3], was proposed for computing
multiple loop-free and link-disjoint paths. Lee et al. [4]
proposed the Split Multipath (SMR) protocol based on DSR
that can find an alternate route maximally disjoint from the
shortest delay route. Jenn-Yue Teo et al. [5] proposed the
Interference-Minimized Multipath Routing (I2MR) protocol to
increase throughput by discovering zone-disjoint paths for load
balancing, requiring minimal localization support. In [6], the
authors propose an on-demand multiple path routing protocol
based on the Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) [7] for mobility.
In [8], the authors propose an on-demand multipath routing
protocol for multi-hop wireless networks that can find spatially
disjoint paths without location information. [9] shows that
finding multiple uncorrelated node-disjoint paths between a
given pair of nodes in an ad hoc network is the same as finding
a chord-less cycle in a graph that contains source and
destination nodes. Wang et al. [10] proposed an approach via
geographic routing to restrict the route request flooding and
guarantee no collision between a pair of nodes by making them
apart from each other by the transmission range.
However, previous multipath routing protocols have
message and/or storage overhead proportional to the number of
nodes and the number of transmission failures. And they did
not consider timely throughput for seamless video streaming
and the congestion problem.
Therefore, in this paper, we propose an opportunistic
transmission mechanism for the seamless video streaming in
the MIMO-capable wireless ad hoc network. Our mechanism
utilizes an extra detour path and the MIMO mode change to
mitigate congestion by dispersing traffic. Also, we support
different QoS requirements of multi-priority packets by
dedicating different paths and MIMO modes to different
priorities.
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 The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The related
work is briefly covered in Section II and the detailed
description of the proposed mechanism is given in Section III.
Section IV presents the simulation results. Finally, we conclude
the paper in Section V.
II. RELATED WORK
The multipath routing can reduce the need for route updates,
balance the traffic load, increase the data transfer rate in a
wireless network and improve the utilization of the limited
resources of a wireless network.
In [4], the authors propose the Split Multipath (SMR)
protocol based on DSR that can find an alternate route
maximally disjoint from the shortest delay route. S. J. Lee and
M. Gerla [5] proposed the Interference-Minimized Multipath
Routing (I2MR) protocol to increase throughput by discovering
zone-disjoint paths for load balancing with requiring minimal
localization support.
A. Nasipuri et al. [6] also focused on DSR and showed how
the intelligent use of multipath techniques can reduce the
frequency of query floods. They developed an analytic
modeling framework to determine the relative frequency of
query floods for various techniques.
In [8], the authors propose an on-demand multipath routing
protocol for the multi-hop wireless network that finds spatially
disjoint paths physically distant from each other without the
need of location information. [9] shows the impact of
interference patterns on the throughput of a wireless network.
In [9], multiple uncorrelated node-disjoint paths between a
given pair of nodes are found based on a scheduling strategy by
taking into account global information as opposed to the local
information considered in the link and node based strategies.
Wang et al. [10] proposed an approach via geographic
routing to restrict the route request flooding to the neighbors of
nodes and guarantee no collision between the routes where
each pair of nodes has to be apart from each other by the
transmission range.
Recently, MIMO-based routing protocols have been
proposed to maximize the performance gain in wireless
networks. They can be categorized into multipath and single-
path routing protocols. K. Sundaresan et al. presented a
representative MIMO routing protocol, MIR [11], based on
DSR. In MIR, when nodes are close to each other, the MUX
mode is used and the DIV mode is used only for disconnected
links. Therefore, the MIR scheme may introduce congestion at
some specific nodes since nodes tend to utilize the MUX mode
as much as possible.
Y.-S. Chen et al. [12] proposed a bow-based multipath
routing protocol to enhance the MIR protocol by continuously
checking the link states of the MIMO ad hoc network.
However, to maintain and use multiple paths, this work needs
the additional overhead of periodic beacon messages and can
operate only in the time division multiple access (TDMA)
system.
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A routing algorithm with QoS provisioning is presented in
[13] to exploit the multiplexing gain and the interference
cancelation property of MIMO antennas.
Compared with previous work, to the best of our
knowledge, this is the first work putting forward an
opportunistic on-demand detour-path routing mechanism and,
at the same time, considering the effect of different QoS
requirements of video streaming in the MIMO-capable wireless
ad hoc network.
III. PROPOSED SCHEME
In this section, we define three types of transmission
policies and the system model, and describe our proposed
multipath routing mechanism in detail.
A. Transmission Policies
We define three transmission policies as follows:
P1: A shortest path with MUX. This policy adopts a
shortest path using MUX. The shortest path is
defined as the minimum latency path constructed by
the DSR routing protocol. MUX is the MIMO
transmission mode used to increase the data rate.
P2: A detour path with MUX. This policy adopts a
detour path using MUX. The detour path is the
shortest among the paths that do not overlap with the
shortest path the most. This policy resolves
congestion and has a higher priority than the policy
P3.
P3: A shortest path with DIV. This policy adopts a
shortest path using DIV. DIV is the MIMO
transmission mode used to increase the transmission
radius. When congestion happens, this policy makes
the congested node bypassed by packets, resulting in
less traffic at the congested node. This policy
requires more processing than P2, so P2 is more
preferred than P3 in resolving congestion.
B. System Model
For the opportunistic transmission mechanism, we
introduce two types of queue thresholds. The current node
queue size is measured against the queue thresholds and the
current node queue size is defined as follows:
m
i
ni
=1 (1)
=
MAX (c )
where
: the threshold value
i : the packet index in the node queue (the ith packet)
m : the total number of packets
ni : the number of bytes of the ith packet
MAX(C) : the maximum capacity of the node queue
 Two types of queue thresholds, THm-d and THd-m (THm-d >
THd-m), are defined. The threshold THm-d is used to indicate
the node to reduce the incoming traffic to avoid congestion. If
is greater than THm-d, the node recognizes that it is
experiencing congestion and figures out the previous-hop node
which has sent packets the most and sends a control message,
called a modified Route Error (mRERR) message, requesting
for a transmission policy change to that node. Upon receiving
the message, the previous-hop node switches its transmission
policy from P1 to P2 or P3 based on the network condition.
The threshold THd-m is used to indicate the node to increase
the traffic for higher throughput. If is less than THd-m, the
congested node sends an mRERR message to the previous-hop
node requesting the node for changing the transmission policy
from P3 to P1.
Figure 1. Scenario with congested nodes
Figure 1 illustrates the operation of our proposed
mechanism. Node pairs (S1, D1) and (S2, D2) are two pairs of
sources and destinations. Initially, each node sends packets by
using MUX to improve the overall network throughput and
periodically checks the queue size of its own. When the queue
of node C temporarily exceeds the threshold THm-d, it is
considered as congestion. Then, node C finds the previous-hop
node A which has sent packets the most by checking the DSR
header and then sends an mRERR message to A to request for
using the P2 or P3 transmission policy. And node A tries to
find the most different path from the former one as a detour
path, so node A finds the path A-I-E-F-G-D1 and sends low
priority packets such as B- and P-frames by using this path,
and sends high priority packets such as I-frames along the
former path.
Now, let us assume that node H also gets congested. If the
previous-hop node C after receiving the mRERR message
from node H cannot find a detour path to the destination, C
changes its transmission policy to P3 (i.e., sends packets by
using DIV) and sends I-, B- and P-frames by using the path C-
J-D2. After congestion is resolved, the congested node H
sends an mRERR message again to the previous-hop node to
request for the transmission policy change from P3 to the
original P1 in order to improve the overall throughput of the
network.
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C. Congestion Control Algorithm with Video Streaming
As described in the previous subsection, upon receiving an
mRERR message, the previous-hop node changes its
transmission policy from P1 to P2 or P3 based on the network
condition. At first, the previous-hop node of the congested
node changes its transmission policy to P2. The previous-hop
node may use its pre-determined detour path or initiate the
route discovery. This detour path must be disjoint from the
formerly used (or original) path and, if there are more than one
disjoint path, the shortest one is chosen. Only the paths whose
hop counts are not larger than that of the original path plus 3
can be the candidates for a detour path (for the reason of using
3, refer to Section IV). If the previous-hop node cannot find a
detour path, it changes its transmission policy to P3.
If the queue length of the congested node becomes less than
the threshold THd-m, the congested node sends an mRERR
message to the previous-hop node again. If the transmission
policy of the previous-hop node is P3, it changes its
transmission policy to P1 in order to improve the network
throughput.
D. Video Streaming
We assume that the video traffic is categorized into three
types of video frames; I-frames, P-frames and B-frames. I-
frames are known to be the most important frames which do
not need the other ones to get decoded. On the other hand, P-
and B-frames should refer to the previous and the following I-
frames to get decoded. Hence, the dependency on I-frames is
much higher than that on P- and B-frames. Thus, assigning
shorter paths to I-frames is vital. Upon congestion, P- and B-
frames are transferred over to a detour path because they are
the second and third levels of importance from the perspective
of video stream reconstruction.
IV. PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
We carried out simulations to evaluate the performance of
our proposed mechanism by using the Qualnet simulator [14].
We have modified DSR such that each source uses its shortest
alternate route as its detour path and we call the scheme the
modified DSR (mDSR). Our mechanism is compared with
mDSR and the MIMO policy only scheme based on MIR. The
simulation parameters are shown in Table 1. The network size
is set to 1,500 m 1,500 m, and the simulation time to 300
seconds. The video encoding method is MPEG and the MPEG
traffic is generated with the pattern of IBBPBBPBBPBB. 50
nodes are randomly placed in the simulation area. The radio
propagation range and the channel capacity of the DIV mode
are chosen to be 750 m and 6 Mbps, respectively. The channel
capacity of the MUX mode is 9 Mbps which is higher than
DIV, and the radio propagation range is 400m. We adopt the
IEEE 802.11g.
 Table 1. Simulation parameters
Parameter
Simulation area
1500 m 1500 m
Traffic Model
Simulation Time
MAC Protocol
Video Encoding Method
Source-Destination pairs
Number of Antennas
Queue Check Time
Speed(MUX)
Speed(DIV)
with 50 nodes. This figure also indicates that the throughput of
the proposed mechanism is higher than the others.
Value
Figure 6 is the graph showing the throughput for the hop
count difference between the detour path and the shortest path
VBR (i.e., (the hop count of the detour path) (the hop count of the
300 s shortest path)). When the hop count difference is 3, the MAC
802.11g layer interference between the detour path and the shortest path
MPEG is small enough that the performance becomes the best. On the
other hand, if the hop count difference is greater than 3, the
2 detour path performs poorly. Hence, in the latter case, we adopt
2 to use P3 instead of the detour path for congestion resolution.
0.5 s
Figure 7 shows the throughput for various numbers of
80% source and destination pairs. More pairs mean higher chance of
50% congestion and of interference in the middle of the shortest
9 Mbps path. Therefore, the throughputs of the three schemes decrease
6 Mbps as the number of pairs increases. However, the proposed
scheme still gives higher throughput than the other schemes.

Figure 2 shows a simple network topology with two flows

realized with the Qualnet.

Figure 3. Traffic changes in terms of the queue size at the

congested node 5

Figure 2. A simple topology with two flows

Figure 3 shows the traffic change in terms of the queue size

at the congested node 5 in Figure 2. The current queue size of
the node is obtained from Eq. (1). We can see that our
mechanism has smaller queue size almost all the time except
for the initial stage. Because our scheme utilizes a detour path
to transmit P- and B-frames, load balancing effect can be
achieved, resulting in smaller queue size. The reason for the
high fluctuation of the MIMO policy only scheme is frequent
changes of the transmission policy between P1 and P3.
Figure 4 shows the throughput for the simple topology in
Figure 4. Throughput of the simple topology in Figure 3
Figure 2. Throughput is the amount of data transferred from
sources to destinations during the given simulation time. This
figure obviously shows that our proposed mechanism gives
higher throughput than the others thanks to the detour path
policy. Figure 5 shows the throughput for a random topology

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Figure 7. Throughput vs. Number of source and

destination pairs

V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, we proposed an opportunistic transmission
mechanism for the seamless video streaming in the MIMO-
capable wireless ad hoc network. Due to the low overhead of
using a single detour path and the opportunistic MIMO mode
change, our proposed mechanism is a proper solution for the
seamless video streaming. By performing extensive
simulations, we showed that our proposed mechanism
improves network performance than mDSR and the MIMO
policy only scheme. As a future work, we will figure out the
optimal node queue thresholds for the opportunistic MIMO
mode change.

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