GREENIE: a novel hybrid routing protocol for efficient video streaming over wireless mesh networks

Abstract

In recent years, video streaming over wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has been of great interest among the users. In WMNs, although node mobility and scalability are the two most important well-known advantages by end-users, they can decrease the perceived video quality on receivers with increasing the probability of path failure, especially when the number of mobile mesh nodes and their mobility speeds increase. Therefore, the necessity of employing an efficient routing protocol to consider the effects of node mobility is inevitable. Moreover, the interference can be sharply increased, especially on the gateways, when there are many mobile mesh nodes in a WMN. Interference does not permit the system to support many STA and mobile mesh nodes. In order to cope with these challenges, this study introduces and evaluates a g ood hybrid r outing protocol for data dissemination which e fficiently and e ffectively routes packets in a wireless mesh n etwork and i ntelligently e mploys proactive and reactive routing protocols based on the node mobility (GREENIE) for efficient video streaming over WMNs and extensively compares it with other routing protocols including hybrid wireless mesh protocol, proactive, reactive, and spanning trees using OMNET++ simulator. GREENIE intelligently distinguishes mobile from static nodes and selects the most stable path between a source and a destination which leads to higher perceived video quality on receivers. The results show the impact of GREENIE on the perceived video quality so that it considerably outperforms other routing protocols in terms of the total number of successfully received packets, the end-to-end delay, and the imposed routing overhead on the system. One of the main advantages of GREENIE is that it performs routing in the medium access control layer without applying any change in the functions of the internet protocol layer.