Multicast Streaming Over Wireless Mesh
CONTEXT AND PURPOSE
Near Enschede, two popular outdoor sports events take place every year: the equestrian ‘Military Boekelo’ and the ‘Enschede Marathon’ run. Jockeys and their horses at the Military and the runners at the Marathon must complete a course covering a vast area. Both events attract many visitors, which pick a place along the course which suit them best or walk along the course. However, these people can only watch the jockeys or runners as they pass by. They cannot follow them before and after they have seen them. To bring such information to the visitors in real time, thereby improving their experience of the event, this information must be retrieved from the participants and then distributed to the requesting visitors. This assignment focusses on the latter aspect and considers multicast video distribution over a wireless mesh network.
A wireless network covering the event area can be realized by a swarm of drones that form the mesh network as a backbone (see picture), while each drone in addition has a WiFi access point to which visitors can connect. The information about a participant enters the mesh network at a particular drone and can be requested by visitors who are connected to possibly many other drones. Hence the need for multicasting. Instead of creating a real mesh network, a realistic simulator of the wireless network is available. This saves much time and effort. The simulator assumes 802.11 wireless links and uses the BATMAN routing protocol.
TASK
In the simulator, BATMAN has been chosen for its rich support of multicast: there is one simple approach and two more advanced approaches, where efficiency increases with advancement. The goal of the assignment is to use the simulator to create a mesh network of ~10 nodes, to realize a streaming application with video sources in at least two nodes, and video subscribers at many different nodes. BATMAN multicast capabilities must be used to deliver the packets from the sources to the subscribers. Which of the available multicast capabilities performs best in your situation?
WORK
40% theory, 40% implementation, 20% writing
Contact:
Jan Laarhuis (j.h.laarhuis@utwente.nl)