A Multipath Video Streaming Solution for Vehicular Networks with Link Disjoint and Node-disjoint

The high quality video streaming in vehicular networks is an urgent topic to provide services on safety and infotainment on the road. To provide high quality video streaming, Forward Error Correction (FEC) is one of the most popular approaches to ensure the needed quality for video streaming by generating duplicated packets. However, several factors might cause problems to FEC in a VANET, like the limited resources of wireless networks, a highly dynamic topology and the large amount of data in video streaming. The duplicated packets might exceed the network capacity. Therefore, in this work, the retransmission mechanism is used to ensure the transmissions, rather than the FEC. The main problem of the retransmission mechanism is the delay. A multi-path solution based on a disjoint algorithm is proposed to reduce the interference and contention, leading to a higher transmission rate and an acceptable delay. In this solution, only I-frames are transmitted through the TCP protocol, and the inter-frames are transmitted through the UDP protocol. To improve the delay of TCP transmissions, a TCP-ETX algorithm is integrated to select the suitable path for TCP transmissions. Simulations are conducted and several results are presented by comparing them to other protocols. Based on the simulation results, the designed multi-path solution protocol provides a higher video quality with a reasonable delay than that of the other protocols.