Enabling Multimedia Services over Wireless Multi-Hop Networks

With the constant development of wireless technologies, the usageof wireless devices tends to increase even more in the future.Wireless multi-hop networks (WMNs) have emerged as a keytechnology to numerous potential scenarios, ranging from disasterrecovery to wireless broadband internet access. The distributedarchitecture of WMNs enables nodes to cooperatively relay othernode's packets. Because of their advantages over other wirelessnetworks, WMNs are undergoing rapid progress and inspiringnumerous applications. However, many technical issues still existin this field. In this thesis we investigate how Voice over IP(VoIP) and peer-to-peer (P2P) application are influenced bywireless multi-hop network characteristics and how to optimizethem in order to provide scalable communication.We first consider the deployment of VoIP service in wirelessmulti-hop networks, by using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)architecture. Our investigation shows that the centralized SIParchitecture imposes several challenges when deployed in thedecentralized wireless multi-hop environment. We find that VoIPquality metrics are severely degraded as the traffic and number ofmultiple hops to the gateway increase. In the context ofscalability, we further propose four alternative approaches whichavoid current limitations.In the second part of this thesis we tackle the network capacityproblem while providing scalable VoIP service over wirelessmulti-hop networks. The performance evaluation shows the influenceof intra and inter-flow interference in channel utilization, whichdirect impacts the VoIP capacity. In order to avoid the small VoIPpacket overhead, we propose a new adaptive hop-by-hop packetaggregation scheme based on wireless link characteristics. Ourperformance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme can increasethe VoIP capacity by a two-fold gain.The study of peer-to-peer applicability over wireless multi-hopnetworks is another important contribution. A resource lookupapplication is realized through structured P2P overlay. We showthat due to several reasons, such as characteristics of wirelesslinks, multi-hop forwarding operation, and structured P2Pmanagement traffic aggressiveness the performance of traditionalP2P applications is rather low in wireless multi-hop environments.Therefore, we suggested that a trade-off between the P2P lookupefficiency and the P2P management traffic overhead can be achievedwhile maintaining the overlay network consistency in wirelessmulti-hop networks