Design and implementation for a UAV-based streaming media system

Abstract

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based video streaming transmission is critical for real-time communication (RTC) applications in flying ad-hoc networks (FANET). The communication links between the nodes, however, are often unstable, especially in harsh network environments. This article first presents an architecture of a UAV-based streaming media system (USMS) for more reliable transmission, where the UAVs play multiple roles simultaneously in terms of video capturing, encoding, transmission, caching, decoding, and evaluation. To promote fluency of video transmission, we propose a distributed algorithm to explore the Tradeoff between the bandWidth, the Load, and the Video parameters (TWLV) based on the UAV flying status and Quality of Service (QoS). To enhance the Quality of Experience (QoE) significantly, we design an application-oriented multi-link transmission system with a novel multi-module stacking technology. Leveraging this design, we implement an extended splitting-merging streaming (ESMS) algorithm to deal with heavy payloads and reduce transmission latency. We also propose a multi-link retransmission (MLR) algorithm to eliminate consecutive packet losses and achieve more efficient video rebuffering. Sufficient experimental results verify that compared with the commercially available products that utilize application-layer forward error correction (AL-FEC), MultiPath TCP (MPTCP), and Deadline-aware Transport Protocol (DTP), our proposed USMS outperforms in throughput promotion, latency reduction, congestion control, packet recovery, and rebuffering efficiency.