Quality of Service and Quality of Experience Evaluation of Real-Time Video Transmission over Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Condition monitoring and remote inspection activities increasingly depend on mobile sensing and video-assisted assessment in environments where fixed communication infrastructure is unavailable or unreliable. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) provide a flexible and rapidly deployable communication framework in such scenarios. However, real-time video traffic is highly sensitive to excessive delay, jitter, and packet loss. This paper presents a performance evaluation of real-time video streaming over MANETs using the NS-3 simulator operating on a Linux-based environment. The Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) protocol with Host and Network Association (HNA) was configured to enable end-to-end connectivity between mobile nodes and an external video receiver through a gateway node. Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, including end-to-end delay, jitter, and packet loss ratio, were measured. In addition, objective Quality of Experience (QoE) metrics—Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM)—were computed from the reconstructed received video stream. to quantify perceptual degradation. Experiments were conducted under varying node densities to investigate scalability, routing stability, and medium contention effects. The results indicate that increasing node density leads to higher routing overhead and channel contention, which consequently degrades QoS performance and results in measurable QoE deterioration. These findings establish a validated baseline reference for subsequent adaptive and intelligence-driven optimisation mechanisms and contribute to a deeper understanding of real-time video behaviour over MANET environments.