QoE Enhancement of SVC Video Streaming Over Vehicular Networks Using Cooperative LTE/802.11p Communications

Real-time streaming of scalable video coded (SVC) videos in vehicular networks is investigated, and novel cooperative vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication methods are proposed. The proposed techniques are based on grouping the moving vehicles into cooperative clusters. Within each cluster, the long term evolution (LTE) system is used to send the data over long range cellular links to a selected cluster head, which multicasts the received video over IEEE 802.11p to vehicles in its cluster. Error concealment techniques are used to compensate the loss of frames that are not delivered on time for real-time video streaming. In addition, resource allocation to select the best subcarriers for LTE transmission is performed in order to enhance the received video quality. Moreover, metrics related to both quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) are studied and analyzed for various video sequences of different characteristics. The V2V video streaming techniques are extended to the case of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Simulation results show that the proposed methods lead to enhanced QoS and QoE compared to the non collaborative scenarios, and their performance tradeoffs compared to recent methods from the literature are discussed.