Optimal video packet distribution in multipath routing for urban VANETs

Video content streaming between two vehicles has various applications in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Due to the highly dynamic nature of VANETs, video contents are usually transferred via multiple discovered routes to increase the chance of error-free packet delivery. However, vehicular routes suffer from limited lifetimes and low connectivity probabilities, which result in increasing packet loss ratio (PLR) and frequent video playback freezing. In this paper, PLR is minimized by optimally distributing video packets in multiple routes while meeting quality of service (QoS) parameters (meeting freezing delay and number of transferred video packets constraints). By doing so, reconstruction and playback of the video are achieved with guaranteed QoS. Performance evaluation of our proposed scheme shows enhancements in terms of average PLR (63.3%), average freezing delay (6%), average packet end-to-end delay (66.6%) and average number of delivered video packets (8%) after 10 seconds simulation.