A Hybrid Video Dissemination Protocol for VANETs

Due to stringent requirements of video streaming and the highly dynamic topology of vehicular networks, the designing of an efficient protocol for disseminating high quality video over VANETs has become extremely challenging. A robust and efficient protocol should guarantee the quality of transmitted videos over a network in terms of Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of user Experience (QoE). Most existing protocols for video streaming over VANETs focus on one aspect of QoS while overlooking others. Besides this, some of these protocols do not consider QoE; hence in some cases, even a very small percentage of packet loss in video networks could lead to provide unusable service. Thus, the goal of this work is to develop an efficient protocol that integrates various promising techniques in an optimal manner in order to support high quality video streaming by way of considering vehicular network peculiarities. This paper proposes a Hybrid Video Dissemination Protocol (HIVE) that deploys a receiver-based relay node selection technique in addition to a MAC congestion control mechanism; this is carried out to avoid high packet collision and latency in respect to vehicle traffic conditions. A combination of these two techniques in an integrated manner provides reasonably high packet delivery ratios. In addition to this, the applying of the Erasure Coding technique on the application layer enhances HIVE performance further by almost no packet loss. This protocol also outperforms the other existing video streaming protocols for VANETs in terms of reconstructed video quality while it complies with scalability and delay requirements for video streaming.