Performance evaluation of TCP and UDP based video streaming in vehicular ad-hoc networks

Video streaming over vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is emerged as an important research area to increase communication intent for drivers. Many video streaming applications in VANET are used to improve safety issues and help to have a more comfortable ride. However, there are some important challenges including, high VANET dynamic topology, links disconnection and transmission video errors which decrease the video quality in such networks. The transport layer protocols serve as a link between the application layer protocols and the services provided by the network layer. The two most popular transport layer protocols are User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). In this paper, we propose an adaptation of UDP and TCP protocols for video streaming in VANET. In addition, an evaluation and comparison between these protocols are performed in order to choose the better transmission protocol at transport layer level for video streaming in VANET. Some objective metrics are considered in this study namely throughput, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and PSNR.