Routing in Wireless Multimedia Home Networks

This paper describes an adapted version of the destination sequenced distance vector routing protocol (DSDV) which is suitable to calculate routes in a wireless real-time home network. The home network is based on a IEEE 802.11b ad hoc network and uses a scheduled token to enforce real-time behaviour to support multimedia streams. The multimedia network protocol works for both single-hop and multi-hop networks, however in the latter case special measures have to be taken to forward streams from node to node and to find routes. Existing routing protocols exhibit non-deterministic behaviour which may interfere with the correct streaming of multimedia. The proposed routing protocol does not rely on flooding, instead it piggy-backs the real-time token and behaves in a predictable manner. Simulation of the routing protocol shows that routes in the network are found in finite time.