A Seamless Quality-Driven Multi-Hop Data Delivery Scheme for Video Streaming in Urban VANET Scenarios

The inherent characteristics of vehicular networks, such as dynamic topology and high mobility, pose significant challenges for the deployment of delay-sensitive applications, e.g., video streaming, in urban Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET). In this paper, we propose an integrated network-layer scheme for seamless delivery of video packets in VANET. First, we propose a new quality-driven routing scheme for delivering video streams from a fixed network to a destination vehicle via multihop communications. The routing scheme aims to optimize the visual quality of the transmitted video frames by minimizing the distortion, the start-up delay, and the frequency of the streaming freezes. We further propose an efficient network mobility management scheme, which introduces a novel adaptation of Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) for multi-hop VANET scenarios, and incorporates a handover prediction mechanism. Numerical results are given to demonstrate that our integrated scheme can achieve a better performance for the video quality metrics, the handover delay and the signalling cost.