Routing for multiple concurrent video sessions in wireless ad hoc networks

Real-time multimedia communication is an important service that should be supported in wireless ad hoc networks, In this paper we consider the problem of how to optimally support multiple concurrent video communication sessions in an ad hoc network. Our problem formulation follows an application-centric cross-layer approach with the objective of minimizing the average distortion for all video sessions via finding optimal paths for each session. Since this network-wide optimization problem is shown to be NP-complete, we pursue to develop competitive heuristic algorithms to address this problem. We find that genetic algorithms (GA) are eminently efficient in solving such cross-layer problems with complex objective functions and constraints. We describe a detailed solution procedure based on the GA approach and use numerical results to demonstrate its superior performance over other conventional approaches. Our efforts in this work provide an important methodology for addressing cross-layer network-wide optimal routing problems for video applications.