Future vision distribution system and network

The future vision distribution service (FVDS) (Sato, K. et al., Proc. 18th Int. Conf. on Advanced Inform. Networking and Application, 2004) is an innovative video delivery service concept based on the Internet ITS (intelligent transport system) area. Source mobility support multicasting (SMM) (Sato et al., IPSJ Journal, vol.45, no.2, 2004) consists of the new multicasting techniques needed to realize FVDS. However, FVDS and SMM lack sufficient application-level protocols to manage preceding and following vehicles on the same route and have a drawback of topological constraints in the access network to accommodate micro mobility. The paper presents two new protocols to solve these problems. The future vision distribution protocol (FVDP) is an application-level protocol that discovers a preceding vehicle on the same route and provides its multicast address for following vehicles by using information from the Global Positioning System (GPS) and a route guiding function. The self-organizing tree (SOT) protocol is a network-level protocol for use in the access network that organizes radio base-stations into a logical tree topology in a self-forming and self-healing manner. This eliminates the topological constraints and provides the network with robustness from failures and flexibility for network design.