Cross-Layer Routing for Multicasting Multiple Description Coded Media in Wireless Mesh Networks

Delivering media traffic that requires very high bandwidth and good reconstruction quality in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) has been a challenging problem due to the limited bandwidth and multihop transmissions. In this paper, we study the problem of multicasting multiple description coded (MDC) media traffic in WMNs. A cross layer routing scheme is designed that builds multiple multicast trees, each of which delivers one description to the mobile stations (MSs) through multihop transmissions. The distortion of recovered media at an MS is determined by which description or descriptions have been correctly received. Our objective is to minimize the worst distortion at all MSs. A linear optimization problem is formulated for the routing and multicast-tree construction problem, and a heuristic scheme with much lower complexity is then proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic scheme achieves much lower minmax distortion than a two-step method for building multicast trees, and in some parameter settings can achieve close-to-optimum min-max distortion.