Towards reliable video transmission over sparse MANETs in emergencies

Abstract

Video delivery in a mobile ad-hoc network that can be deployed by members of an emergency service in an incident zone is an appealing tool for emergency and rescue services, but has not been studied yet. In order to design and test a suitable solution, we have generated realistic evaluation scenarios by modeling fireman action plans and GPS traces from real situations. We propose an overlay network solution with routing and reliability mechanisms. The Emergency Overlay Routing (EOR) protocol is a reactive protocol integrated into a store-carry-forward architecture. It selects ferry nodes to transport video data from a camera in the Incident Area to the Incident Chief’s node, looking for the minimum delay, but reliable, candidate. We also propose a simple credit based mechanism (RTCP+) to improve the communication reliability. The evaluation of the whole system shows a great improvement against previous results and promising expectations.