Tele-Immersion for Wireless Networks

Tele-immersive 3D multi camera environments are beginning to emerge and they bring with them lots of applications as well as challenging research problems. They enable cooperative interaction between geographically distributed sites. One of the important questions that arises in the design and implementation of such systems is that how to transmit huge amounts of 3D data consisting of multiple streams, which is generated by multiple interdependent sources in one tele-immersive environment. Due to data requirements, in the past a tele-immersive session occurred only over wired networks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to transmit this enormous amount of data using multiple streams over wireless mesh networks. One of the significant novelties of our work is to find multiple transmission paths from a given source to a destination and to transmit data concurrently over them. This, according to us, would comprise the first step towards porting a tele-immersive system from the wired to the wireless domain. We have implemented the algorithm over ns-2 simulator. Through our extensive simulation studies, we have compared the performance of the proposed algorithm with existing wireless multi-path and single-path protocols and show that our protocol achieves markedly better performance.