Video streaming forwarding in a smart city’s VANET

Abstract

In Smart Cities, Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) will cover an important role with a development of safety application and smart vehicle video surveillance services. With an on-board screen and smart components, multimedia communication over VANETs let drivers, passengers to capture live scenes, share, and access on-road multimedia services. In a monitored area, vehicles can transmit live video streaming of disasters or traffic accidents and provide significant visual information. In this research we propose an application offering multiple services in a smart city’s VANET. As, the main concern of the video streaming transmission in such highly dynamic environments is the enhancement of the Quality of Experience (QoE), one of the critical issues in VANET is the design of a proper routing protocol which handle this variety of services. In this paper, we focus on multi-hop level forwarding and we propose a Delay, Quality of Link and Link lifeTime aware routing protocol suitable for Video streaming (DQLTV). In the aim to find out a route from communicating vehicles, we define a mathematical model for simultaneously maximizing the quality of link and link lifetime and minimizing the distance coupled with hop count in order to minimize the delay. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DQLTV, we compare it with the AODV-ETX protocol in terms of QoE and QoS metrics. The simulation results show that our model outperforms AODV-ETX in terms of QoE metrics, the PSNR (Peack Signal to Noise Ratio), MOS (Mean Opinion Score) and SSIM (Structural SIMilarity). Our protocol also outperforms AODV-ETX in terms of QoS metrics, the end-to-end delays and frame loss.