Towards a QoE-driven mechanism for improved H.265 video delivery

The employment of video-equipped vehicles is growing apace. Following the same trend is the number of available applications and services place at disposal in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Conversely, video services are commonly referred as one of the most stringent applications, on the grounds that it requires a quality-aware steady and uninterrupted flow of information. Because of that, a number of challenges arose, including how to deal with the scarce network resources, the high-error rates and the time-varying channel conditions. This unveils the need for an adaptive video-aware and Quality of Experience (QoE)-driven mechanism to take care of these challenges and deliver video sequences with good quality. To this end, Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques can be customized to support video transmissions with QoE assurance over high-mobility and error-prone networks. The adaptive QoE-driven mechanism proposed in this paper improves the resilience of real-time video transmissions against packet losses. It relies on the combination of VANETs characteristics and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) details to provide a tailored amount of redundancy, which improves both the usage of resources and the user experience. The advantages and footprint of the mechanism are evidenced through extensive experiments and QoE assessments, proving that the proposed mechanism outperforms non-adaptive and also adaptive competitors.