A Priority Aware Buffer Management Scheme for H.264 Video Over MANET

Includes bibliographical references (pages 51-52).Video is bandwidth hungry and delay-sensitive and the compressed video bit stream is very sensitive to packet losses. The transmission of compressed video over the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is very challenging due to the limited bandwidth resources and error-prone channels. It is therefore important to reduce the packet loss by intelligently\ud handling the video traffic. In this thesis, we use a routing protocol, known as the Ad Hoc On Demand Multipath Distance Vector Routing Protocol with Dynamic Path Update (AOMDV-DPU) which is an extension of AOMDV. AOMDV-DPU emphasizes on maintaining the secondary paths to the destination along with the primary route so that a back-up route can be used in case of the failure of the primary route. We propose a buffer management scheme, called Smart Queuing technique that intelligently sorts the H.264/AVC compressed video packets in the buffer according to their priority. As a result, the higher priority packets do not have to wait longer or expire in the queue to get the channel access. The purpose of the scheme is to serve the higher priority packets better than the lower priority packets thereby increasing the goodput of the network. The routing protocol is integrated with the Smart Queue to serve the higher priority packets and hence increase the quality of the video transmission