Opportunistic routing for live video streaming in vehicular ad hoc networks

Due to the ability to provide more precise and user friendly information, video streaming delivery over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has become a hot topic in recent years. In spite of many challenges, several routing schemes have been proposed. However, these schemes excessively focused on the minimization of delivery delay, and did not realize that immoderate utilization of wireless fading channels could incur high distortion due to high probabilities of video package loss and damage. Moreover, in these schemes, the interference from neighbors is not considered during the relay selection, which could decrease the delivery quality greatly. Therefore, in this paper, we take interference into account and formulate rate distortion model of live video streaming in VANETs. Based on the model, we propose a novel routing protocol, which could maximize the end-to-end delivery quality of live video streaming by seeking a balance between distortion and delay. The performance of our protocol is validated based on the real-life traces.