An Adaptive Video Streaming System Over a Cooperative Fleet of Vehicles Using the Mobile Bandwidth Aggregation Approach

With the development of vehicular networks, new types of networking services arise for automotive users. With regard to multimedia streaming services, a vehicle may not have good quality of service (QoS) of video streaming using its own individual 3G/3.5G wireless interface. This paper is motivated to investigate the k-hop cooperative streaming scenario in fleet-based vehicular networks. When a vehicle requests a video stream encoded in H.264/Scalable Video Coding from the Internet using its 3G/3.5G network, it asks help from vehicles belonging to the same fleet within its k-hop transmission range to download the requested video data cooperatively through these vehicles' 3G/3.5G network and then forward these downloaded video to the requested vehicle through vehicle-to-vehicle IEEE 802.11p networks. A k-hop adaptive video transmission protocol is proposed to have better throughput by the following: 1) selecting suitable vehicles within k-hop coverage to download video data and 2) retransmitting the lost video data from the video server to improve the quality of video. We utilize EstiNet Network Simulator and Emulator (NCTUns) to simulate the proposed schemes. Based on the simulation results, the priority-first (PF) assignment scheme with the PF retransmission scheme is suitable to be adopted in the cooperative video streaming scenario over the vehicular networks.