Streaming-Viability Analysis and Packet Scheduling for Video Over In-Vehicle Wireless Networks

State-of-the-art vehicles are now being equipped with multiple video channels for video-data transmission from multiple surveillance cameras mounted on the automobile, navigation videos reporting the traffic conditions on the planned route, as well as entertainment-multimedia streaming for passengers watching on rear-seat monitors. Wireless LANs provide a low-cost and flexible infrastructure for these emerging in-vehicle multimedia services aimed at the driver´s and passengers´ safety, convenience, and entertainment. To enable the successful simultaneous deployment of such applications over in-vehicle wireless networks, we propose delay-sensitive streaming and packet-scheduling algorithms that enable simple, flexible, and efficient adaptation of the video bitstreams to the instantaneously changing video source and wireless-channel characteristics while complying with the a priori negotiated quality-of-service (QoS) parameters for that video service. Our focus is on real-time low-cost solutions for multimedia transmission over in-vehicle wireless networks that are derived based on existing protocols defined by QoS-enabled networks, such as the IEEE 802.11e standard. In addition, the aim of this paper is to couple the proposed solutions with a novel multitrack-hinting method that is proposed as an extension of conventional MP4 hint tracks in order to provide real-time adaptation of multimedia streams to multiple quality levels for different in-vehicle applications, depending on their importance and delay constraints. First, the scheduling constraints for these simultaneous wireless video-streaming sessions are analytically expressed as a function of the negotiated QoS parameters. This is imperative because a video stream received from an in-vehicle road-surveillance camera will have a different set of delay and quality constraints in comparison to that of traffic monitoring received from remote video cameras located on the planned route. Hence, transmission paramete- - rs, such as peak data rate, maximum burst size, minimum transmission delay, maximum error rate, etc., will differ for the various video streams. For this reason, new low-complexity packet-scheduling algorithms that can fulfill diverse QoS streaming conditions are proposed and analyzed. The proposed algorithms produce viable schedules (i.e., strictly QoS-compliant) that jointly consider the delay constraints and the in-vehicle video-receiver-buffer conditions. Hence, these scheduling schemes can completely avoid the underflow or overflow event of the receiving-device buffer while guaranteeing the agreement between the real-time video traffic and the predetermined traffic specification reached during QoS negotiation for various in-vehicle video channels. When combined with multitrack hinting, an integrated flexible system for adaptive multimedia streaming over QoS-enabled in-vehicle wireless networks can be constructed. We demonstrate the viability of the proposed scheduling mechanisms experimentally by using real video traces under multiple quality levels, as derived by the multitrack-hinting design. In addition, simulations under realistic conditions are also performed to validate the ability of the method to satisfy buffer-occupancy constraints.