On joint routing and server selection for MD video streaming in ad hoc networks

For media streaming in ad hoc networks, service replication has been demonstrated to be a quite effective countermeasure to streaming interruptions caused by fragile paths and dynamic topology. In this paper, we study the problem of joint routing and server selection for double description (DD) video streaming in ad hoc networks. We formulate the task as a combinatorial optimization problem and present tight lower and upper bounds for the achievable distortion. The upper bound provides a feasible solution to the formulated problem. Our extensive numerical results show that the bounds are very close to each other for all the cases studied, indicating the near-global optimality of the derived upper bounding solution. Moreover, we observe significant gains in video quality achieved by the proposed approach over existing server selection schemes. This justifies the importance of jointly considering routing and server selection for optimal MD video streaming