Enhancing the Performance of Vehicle-to-Vehicle Realtime Video Streaming for Platoons

Platooning is nowadays one of the most promising applications for vehicle-to-vehicle communications. Platooning makes multiple vehicles travel as closely as possible to get the maximum driving efficiency. The problem here is that the view of the rear vehicle driver may be blocked by the front vehicle. In order to improve rear driver's safety and psychological stability, video streaming among vehicles aims to provide the front view of the platoon leader to rear vehicle drivers. In this paper, we first focus on measurement of realtime video streaming performance using IEEE 802.11p broadcast in the platoon. As a result, packet delivery ratio dropped to 48% in the worst case that the collision and hidden terminal problem coexist. To mitigate the frame loss, we use pseudo-broadcast that can recover frames by retransmission instead of broadcast. In addition, we employ Request-To-Send/Clear-To-Send whose transmission power increased by 5 dB to solve the hidden terminal problem. Consequently, we can prevent the frame loss and increase the packet delivery ratio up to 96.8%. Our proposal enables vehicle-to-vehicle communications to exploit a new method integrating characteristics of unicast and broadcast to solve this problem. Besides, our proposal can easily apply to existing devices by updating a device driver without any hardware chip level modification.