Beacon-less video streaming management for VANETs based on QoE and link-quality

Abstract

Real-time video dissemination over Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) is fundamental for many services, e.g., emergency video delivery, road-side video surveillance, and advertisement broadcasting. These applications deal with several challenges due to strict video quality level requirements and highly dynamic topologies. To handle these challenges, geographic receiver-based beacon-less approaches have been proposed as a suitable solution for forwarding video flows in VANETs. In general, the routing decisions are performed only based on network, link, and/or node characteristics, such as link quality and vehicle's location. However, in real situations, due to different requirements and hierarchical structures of multimedia applications, these existent routing decisions are not satisfactory to select the best relay nodes and build up reliable backbones to delivery video content with reduced delay and high Quality of Experience (QoE). This paper introduces the QOe-Driven and LInk-qualiTy rEceiver-based (QOALITE) protocol to allow live video dissemination with QoE assurance in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) scenarios. QOALITE considers video and QoE-awareness, coupled with location and link quality attributes for relay selection. Simulation results show the benefits of QOALITE when compared to existing work, while achieving multimedia transmission with QoE support and robustness in highway scenarios.