A Multi-flow-Driven Mechanism to Support Live Video Streaming on VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) promise a wide scope of real-time multimedia services, which need to deal with strict quality level requirements and highly dynamic network topology. To handle these challenges, multipath routing approaches have been applied to bring improvements in Quality of Experience (QoE) levels and support on-road real-time video delivery. Though, in real situations, there will likely be multiple streams simultaneously, which can cause more congestion periods and packet loss rates. This paper proposes the Multi-flow-driven VIdeo Delivery (MVIDE) mechanism to select best routes for live video sequences in VANETs. MVIDE can be integrated with routing protocols to define routes considering the characteristics of multiple paths, vehicle mobility, and application requirements. This cross-layer mechanism ranks the quality of candidate paths based on the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method and, subsequently, assigns paths to different sub streams. MVIDE was added to the GPSR-MA protocol, being called GPSR-MA-MVIDE. Simulating results show that GPSR-MA-MVIDE outperforms GPSR-MA in terms of multi-flow handling and received video quality.