Real-World Multimedia Streaming for Software Defined Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Multimedia services with required Quality of Service (QoS) is one of the most critical challenges in Software Defined Network (SDN) based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs). It forms an essential part of the Intelligent Transport System (ITS), where infotainment services play an essential role.Streaming multimedia is one of the most popular applications and has a high demand for VANET infotainment services. The major issues for multimedia streaming on VANET are scalability, mobility of vehicles, frequent connection failures, frequent change in network topology, and distributed architecture with heterogeneous devices. To overcome these problems and provide a better QoS, we propose using a hybridarchitecture with a combination of VANET and SDN called Software-Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN). This work presents a modified POX controller-based SDN framework for VANETs, especially for multimedia streaming applications in realistic traffic patterns. The proposed work has a real-world setup developed using Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO), where iPerf generates multimedia traffic. Also, streaming standard-definition YouTube videos in real-time between the vehicular nodes was done. The modified POX controller could take advantage of the centralised perspective of the network for action determination, and the integrated spanning tree algorithm reduced the redundancy. Despite the dynamic nature of the testing environments, the proposed Modified POX Controller consistently outperformed VANET, with up to 21 to 42% better packet delivery ratio for higher data transfer rates. The overall improvement in QoS parameters also accompanies an improvement in the consumers Quality of Experience (QoE) factors.