Reliable video geocasting over vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Video communication over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) has many applications, such as emergency video transmission, commercial advertisements and inter-vehicle digital entertainment. However, in urban vehicular scenario, delivering video streams to highly mobile vehicles is indeed a challenging task due to high radio interference, channel loss rate and burst packet losses. Thus, designing an error resilient scheme for reliable video geocasting in such harsh scenarios needs to be addressed. In this paper, we propose an error resilient scheme based on packet level Forward Error Correction (FEC) and interleaving technique for reliable video geocasting over VANET. The proposed scheme is able to adapt channel variations by using a Real Time Control Protocol (RTCP) report of vehicles within communication range of the video source. To achieve a fair comparison with other error protection schemes, we have implemented a proposed error resilient scheme in Network Simulator 2 (NS 2). The results of simulation based study show that the proposed scheme is able to improve perceived video quality and protection efficiency while minimizing bandwidth overhead (introduced by proactive error recovery) in urban vehicular scenarios.