Video communication is an important application area for a multihop wireless network. This paper studies the problem of finding the optimal encoding rates for a number of video sessions in such network. The objective is to maximize the video quality at the receivers and the optimization space takes into consideration, the interaction among all the active video sessions. A branch-and-bound solution procedure is proposed to solve this nonconvex, non-polynomial programming problem. Using analytical and simulation results, we show that this solution procedure is an effective approach for addressing such complex cross-layer optimization problem