Media Handling for Conferencing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

The new services and applications that can rise in
the upcoming years will be the multi-network systems
integrating next generation and traditional networks.
Those services and applications will guarantee
transition and compatibility between different
generations of network systems. Within this
dissertation we focus on conferencing applications in
Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) and Multihop Cellular
Networks. Conferencing includes popular applications
such as audio/video conferencing and massive gaming.
It requires two sessions: a call signaling and a
media handling. Call signaling is used to set up
conference sessions. Media handling deals with
aspects such as media transportation and media
mixing. We propose a self-organizing media handling
architecture based on two overlay networks: one for
mixing and one for control. For mixing, a distributed
mixing architecture that balances the load among the
nodes according to their capabilities is proposed.
The control tasks are assured by a media signaling
protocol based on an extended version of Megaco/H.248.
For Multihop Cellular Networks, media
mediators are used to connect the entities of MANETs
with the entities of Cellular Networks.

Autorentext
Dhafer Ben-Khedher holds a Ph.D in computer engineering from the Concordia University, Canada. He is an assistant professor at the University of Sharjah, UAE. He has held research projects at Ericsson Canada for five years. His research interests include protocol engineering and QoS of multimedia applications in next generation networks.

Klappentext
The new services and applications that can rise in the upcoming years will be the multi-network systems integrating next generation and traditional networks. Those services and applications will guarantee transition and compatibility between different generations of network systems. Within this dissertation we focus on conferencing applications in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) and Multihop Cellular Networks. Conferencing includes popular applications such as audio/video conferencing and massive gaming. It requires two sessions: a call signaling and a media handling. Call signaling is used to set up conference sessions. Media handling deals with aspects such as media transportation and media mixing. We propose a self-organizing media handling architecture based on two overlay networks: one for mixing and one for control. For mixing, a distributed mixing architecture that balances the load among the nodes according to their capabilities is proposed. The control tasks are assured by a media signaling protocol based on an extended version of Megaco/H.248. For Multihop Cellular Networks, media mediators are used to connect the entities of MANETs with the entities of Cellular Networks.