An Experimental QoE Performance Study for the Efficient Transmission of High Demanding Traffic over an Ad Hoc Network Using BATMAN

Abstract

Multimedia communications are attracting great attention from the research, industry, and end-user communities. The latter are increasingly claiming for higher levels of quality and the possibility of consuming multimedia content from a plethora of devices at their disposal. Clearly, the most appealing gadgets are those that communicate wirelessly to access these services. However, current wireless technologies raise severe concerns to support extremely demanding services such as real-time multimedia transmissions. This paper evaluates from QoE and QoS perspectives the capability of the ad hoc routing protocol called BATMAN to support Voice over IP and video traffic. To this end, two test-benches were proposed, namely, a real (emulated) testbed and a simulation framework. Additionally, a series of modifications was proposed on both protocols’ parameters settings and video-stream characteristics that contributes to further improving the multimedia quality perceived by the users. The performance of the well-extended protocol OLSR is also evaluated in detail to compare it with BATMAN. From the results, a notably high correlation between real experimentation and computer simulation outcomes was observed. It was also found out that, with the proper configuration, BATMAN is able to transmit several QCIF video-streams and VoIP calls with high quality. In addition, BATMAN outperforms OLSR supporting multimedia traffic in both experimental and simulated environments.