A Link Adaptive Transport Protocol for Multimedia Streaming Applications in Multi Hop Wireless Networks

Transport layer performance in multi hop wireless networks has been greatly challenged by the intrinsic characteristics of these networks. In particular, the nature of congestion, which is mainly due to medium contention in multi hop wireless networks, challenges the performance of traditional transport protocols in such networks. In this paper, we first study the impact of medium contention on transport layer performance and then propose a new transport protocol for improving quality of service performance in multi hop wireless networks. Our proposed protocol, Link Adaptive Transport Protocol provides a systemic way of controlling transport layer offered load for multimedia streaming applications, based on the degree of medium contention information received from the network. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol provides an efficient scheme to improve quality of service performance metrics, such as end-to-end delay, jitter, packet loss rate, throughput smoothness and fairness for media streaming applications. In addition, our scheme requires few overhead and does not maintain any per-flow state table at intermediate nodes. This makes it less complex and more cost effective.