With the increasing demand on multimedia applications over the Internet, and the growing number of mobile smart devices people are using, it is helpful to develop a mobile network architecture that can support multimedia transmission without using infrastructures. We propose that service overlay networks over MANETs can serve as a supplement to the existing 3G/4G networks and Wi-Fi access point networks. In this thesis we present experiment results that show the feasibility of mobile service overlay networks to meet the requirements of multimedia streaming. And also, we improved one of the existing overlay protocols. The improved protocol takes physical location into consideration when establishing connections in the overlay network. It also limits the number of neighbors each node can have, which prevents a particular node from becoming the bottleneck of the network, when connected to too many neighbors. Evaluation results show the new protocol reduces network packet loss rate.

With the increasing demand on multimedia applications over the Internet, and the growing number of mobile smart devices people are using, it is helpful to develop a mobile network architecture that can support multimedia transmission without using infrastructures. We propose that service overlay networks over MANETs can serve as a supplement to the existing 3G/4G networks and Wi-Fi access point networks. In this thesis we present experiment results that show the feasibility of mobile service overlay networks to meet the requirements of multimedia streaming. And also, we improved one of the existing overlay protocols. The improved protocol takes physical location into consideration when establishing connections in the overlay network. It also limits the number of neighbors each node can have, which prevents a particular node from becoming the bottleneck of the network, when connected to too many neighbors. Evaluation results show the new protocol reduces network packet loss rate.