Self-organizing Seamless Multimedia Streaming in Dense MANETs

Recent advances in pervasive computing and portable devices are opening brand new mobile multimedia opportunities, such as tailored multimedia delivery to mobile peers in pervasive environments that become densely populated at runtime, also unexpectedly (dense MANETs with Areas Of Interest, or dense AOIs). Notable application examples include video advertisements in highly populated exhibition pavilions and audio guides in tourist points that become popular or highly visited dynamically. The dynamicity and unpredictability of dense AOIs makes it difficult, expensive, and inappropriate to plan/use traditional fixed infrastructures for multimedia provisioning there. This paper proposes a novel, easy-to-deploy, lightweight, and self-organizing solution for automatic determination of dense AOIs and seamless support of multimedia streaming in these pervasive environments. The primary guideline is to exploit mobile peers, strategically chosen and continuously re-elected close to dense AOI center, i) for AOI identification and ii) as local dynamic mobile relays between the dense locality and the Internet. The reported results show that, thanks to novel techniques for anchor-free mobility prediction, our proposal implementation, called Localized rElay-based mobile Multimedia (LEM), can grant streaming continuity by dynamically achieving the proper quality-overhead tradeoff.