Streaming for vehicular users via elastic proxy buffer management

In this article we refer to the market of vehicular networks, where groups of customers located in the same public vehicle (e.g., a train or bus) connect to a terrestrial network through a wireless/satellite backbone link. Elastic buffering is a proxy management technique devised to decouple the multimedia information retrieval rate on the network backbone from the playout streaming rate at the user terminal. It has been shown in the past that the application of elastic buffering mechanisms in terrestrial networks brings significant advantages in terms of network effectiveness. We show that elastic buffering is an extremely effective means to reduce, or even eliminate, streaming service outage due to intermittent backbone connectivity, such as that occurring when a vehicle moves through tunnels. Moreover, we show that elastic buffering is not only a technique suitable for multimedia information retrieval services, but can be effectively applied to delayed real-time services.