Power and delay analysis of the WEAC protocol based MANET under video transport

Transporting video over wireless networks has two-fold constraints. Not only should it satisfy delay requirements but power minimization and QoS issues should be handled carefully also. Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are more sensitive to these issues where each mobile device acts like a router and thus, routing delay adds significantly to overall end-to-end delay. In this paper, we analyze the performance of the Warning Energy Aware Cluster head / Virtual Base Station-On demand (WEAC/VBS-O) protocol, proposed earlier by one of the authors [1], in terms of average delay, multihop communication and power minimization aspects subject to video traffic. We use H.263 standard to model video traffic in our simulation design. Primarily, we establish a single hop communication between nodes. It is then extended to multihop communication. However, we find that the protocol can support up to 2 hops for an acceptable network performance provided there is a significant number of nodes in the network. We also take power minimization issue into consideration and minimize power consumption by making use of HCB model by applying it within the neighborhood of the node. Simulation results show that this strategy does minimize power consumption and it does not degrade multihop communication improvement. We finally show that the protocol is quite suitable for video traffic as it fulfils delay and other necessary requirements for a typical ad hoc network.