Evaluation of flooding schemes for real-time video transmission in VANETs

Long-distance real-time video flooding over Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) is challenging due to the dynamic nature of vehicular networks. Real-time video transmission has high requirements in terms of bandwidth and delay, while VANETs are characterized by very limited radio resources and high mobility. Our objective is to compare ten different flooding schemes specially designed for this task and select the best in terms of packet arrival ratio and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Additionally, we propose Automatic Copies Distance Based (ACDB), an improved flooding scheme, to cope with variable vehicle density situations. Furthermore, to ensure a good behavior under all types of circumstances, we also study the impact of Global Positioning System (GPS) drift on these schemes. Simulation results show that long-distance real-time video flooding transmission is feasible under certain vehicle density conditions and the quality achieved is enough to allow using such solutions in future applications. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.