A distributed backbone-based framework for live video sharing in VANETs

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been expanding their portfolio to support a large variety of services, ranging from safety to on-road multimedia applications. The distribution of real-time videos in a Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) fashion allows drivers, passengers, paramedics, and first responder teams to capture, share, and watch video sequences from accidents and disasters that happened kilometers away. In this context, the transmission of live video streams in V2V scenarios must be done with Quality of Experience (QoE) criteria. This paper introduces the DBD (Distributed Beaconless Dissemination) protocol that improves the delivery of real-time video ows on multimedia highway VANETs, where it is important to maintain backbone-based routes for video dissemination in multi-path opportunistic V2V environments. The proposed solution improves the IEEE 802.11p MAC layer to solve the Spurious Forwarding problem, while increasing the packet delivery ratio and reducing the forwarding delay, especially in heavy vehicular traffic conditions caused by accidents, that we recreated from empirical data. Performance evaluation results show the benefits of DBD compared to existing works in forwarding video sequences in V2V VANET scenarios, on the basis of objective and subjective QoE measurements. Copyright © 2014 ACM