RDSR-V. Reliable Dynamic Source Routing for video-streaming over mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are infrastructureless networks formed by wireless mobile devices with limited battery life. In MANETs for civilian applications, the network nodes may not belong to a single authority and they may not have a common goal. These MANETs are particularly vulnerable to selfish behavior, as some nodes may prefer saving resources to forward data. There are a few generic reputation-based systems for MANETs which could be used to enforce cooperation among nodes. However, we envision that the system performance can be highly improved by using cross-layer techniques that take into account the specific characteristics of each particular service. In this article, we propose a distributed and easy-to-implement routing mechanism based on reputation for the provision of MPEG-2 video-streaming services over MANETs. The main novelty that we introduce regarding the existent literature is that our proposal is service aware, that is to say, we consider the video-streaming service characteristics to develop a cross-layer design with the routing protocol. In addition, we do not introduce extra signaling overhead to monitor reputation because we use the standard video-streaming end-to-end signaling. Finally, simulation results show that our proposal clearly outperforms both standard Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) and OCEAN (a generic reputation-based mechanism).