A distributed beaconless routing protocol for real-time video dissemination in multimedia VANETs

doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2014.08.009

Computer Communications

Volume 58, 1 March 2015, Pages 40-52

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2014.08.009 Get rights and content

Highlights

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We design a framework for video (and in general high data rate applications) transmission over a VANET.
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Our framework includes both application and routing layer design.
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We analyze MAC layer behavior and improve its utilization by solving the Spurious Forwarding problem.
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We tested our protocols on a real scenario, and considered both QoS and QoE, including MOS experiments in a real car.
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We grant a high data rate in ad-hoc mode, also for long distance, through our backbone beaconless approach.

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) will play an important role in Smart Cities and will support the development of not only safety applications, but also car smart video surveillance services. Recent improvements in multimedia over VANETs allow drivers, passengers, and rescue teams to capture, share, and access on-road multimedia services. Vehicles can cooperate with each other to transmit live flows of traffic accidents or disasters and provide drivers, passengers, and rescue teams rich visual information about a monitored area. Since humans will watch the videos, their distribution must be done by considering the provided Quality of Experience (QoE) even in multi-hop, multi-path, and dynamic environments. This article introduces an application framework to handle this kind of services and a routing protocol, the DBD (Distributed Beaconless Dissemination), that enhances the dissemination of live video flows on multimedia highway VANETs. DBD uses a backbone-based approach to create and maintain persistent and high quality routes during the video delivery in opportunistic Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) scenarios. It also improves the performance of the IEEE 802.11p MAC layer, by solving the Spurious Forwarding (SF) problem, while increasing the packet delivery ratio and reducing the forwarding delay. Performance evaluation results show the benefits of DBD compared to existing works in forwarding videos over VANETs, where main objective and subjective QoE results are measured.

Introduction

Safety and video surveillance car applications are key Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) services for smart city scenarios and have been attracting an important attention from governments, car manufacturers, academia, and society [1]. Nowadays, the distribution of real-time multimedia content over Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) is becoming a reality and allowing drivers/passengers to have new experiences with on-road videos in a smart city [2], [3]. According to Cisco, video traffic will represent over 90% of the global IP data in a few years, where thousands of users will produce, share, and consume multimedia services ubiquitously, including in their vehicles.

Multimedia VANETs are well-suited for capturing and sharing environmental monitoring, surveillance, traffic accidents, and disaster-based video smart city applications. Live streaming video flows provide users and authorities (e.g., first responder teams and paramedics) with more precise information than simple text messages and allow them to determine a suitable action, while reducing human reaction times [4]. Vehicles can cooperate with each other to disseminate short videos of dangerous situations to visually inform drivers and rescue teams about them both in the city and on a highway.

The perception of videos shared and watched by humans, characterized in terms of Quality of Experience (QoE), is directly measured by the acceptability of the users and is related to, but differs from the extensively studied concept Quality of Service (QoS) [5]. QoS-based approaches and metrics, such as the ones based on link/network-related parameters (packet loss, packet delay, and/or Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI)) fail to capture subjective aspects of video content related to human visual system as expected for human-centric environments. Therefore, QoE objective and subjective metrics, such as Structural Similarity (SSIM), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Mean Opinion Score (MOS) must be used to measure the video quality level from the user point-of-view [6].

The broadcast nature of vehicular communications brings many technical challenges to the delivery of real-time video flows in VANETs with QoE support. The distribution of live video sequences (from seconds to minutes) with QoE assurance in a VANET is strongly influenced by forwarding schemes, especially in long distance transmissions where, for instance, there are no emergency vehicles in the surroundings and multi-hop V2V communications are required. The destination vehicle(s) can be placed kilometers away from the source and expects to receive on-line video sequences with a good quality level through V2V forwarding schemes.

Several forwarding solutions have been proposed in the literature for VANETs [7]. A contention-based forwarding is a well-accepted approach for forwarding data in dynamic multimedia VANETs, where end-to-end routes may not exist at anytime [8]. Opportunistic schemes decide the next-hop forwarder based on a distribution contention phase and with an extra delay; reactive solutions create and maintain a route on-demand, but they are not easily adaptable to geo-cast routing. Proactive solutions define the relay nodes before the content transmission, which is not suitable for dynamic scenarios, like cities. To improve the system performance and video quality level, an opportunistic and beaconless geographic routing protocol is required, in order to create and maintain a high quality backbone for video flows, while increasing the packet delivery ratio, reacting well to dynamic environments or node failures, and avoiding the Spurious Forwarding (SF) problem [9]: this is an issue that because of time-contingent transmissions may erroneously stop the packet propagation, affecting the packet delivery ratio, more and more as the bit rate raises.

This article presents a protocol for real-time video dissemination on multimedia highway VANETs, called DBD (Distributed Beaconless Dissemination), together with an application framework that allows vehicles to seamlessly share videos (e.g., danger situations, disasters, or surveillance smart city applications) with other peers in a multi-path fashion and with QoE assurance. Our proposed protocol creates V2V backbones for fast video packet relaying, thus increasing the packet delivery ratio, reducing the forwarding delay caused by the contention phase of reactive/opportunistic geographic routing schemes, and enhancing the user experience when watching live video flows. At the same time, it also aims to improve the IEEE 802.11p MAC (Medium Access Control) layer utilization to solve the SF problem.

The proposed solution improves the transmission of live on-road videos for medium-long distances as required for disaster, surveillance, and even for many entertainment multimedia smart city services. The benefits of DBD compared to existing works in forwarding video flows in urban highway infrastructureless VANETs are demonstrated with the aid of simulation and real QoE experiments, where main objective and subjective QoE results are presented, namely SSIM, PSNR, and MOS. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to evaluate a routing scheme for live video streaming in VANETs with real MOS experiments.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the related works; our proposal is explained in Section 3, together with details about the SF problem. Section 4 presents the test environment, scenario, implementations, and simulation results. The conclusion and future work are described in Section 5.

Section snippets

Related works

This section presents the main routing approaches for transmitting video flows in VANETs available in the literature. It is important not only to propose new video-based routing schemes, but also to evaluate their performance based on QoE metrics.

There are many ways to route a packet: one is proactively building a route, before needed, and constantly keeping it updated or another one is to choose the forwarder nodes reactively (which means when you need a route in a specific geographic

The proposed application framework and the Distributed Backbone Dissemination (DBD) protocol for Multimedia VANETs

This section introduces our application framework and the DBD routing protocol, to improve on-road live video distributions in multi-hop VANETs. DBD uses a backbone-based approach to create persistent and high quality routes for video delivery in dynamic smart city environments. It also improves the interaction with the IEEE 802.11p MAC layer to solve the Spurious Forwarding problem and the usage of wireless resources. Examples of live videos for VANETs include video surveillance,

Performance analysis

The main objective of this performance evaluation analysis is to measure the quality level of live video flows in urban highway VANETs by comparing several key routing proposals, namely DBD, DBF (Delay Based Forwarding) [20], PBF (Probability Based Forwarding) [21], and RND (Random Forwarding) [22].

To highlight the benefits of DBD in disseminating live video flows, while maintaining a high quality backbone, a comparison with the three above protocols is done. The aim is to cover the major node

Conclusion

Multimedia VANETs are well-suited for capturing and sharing surveillance, traffic accidents, and disaster-based smart city video applications, where their quality level must be measured by using QoE metrics. This article presented an application framework to allow video request and sharing and a routing protocol (DBD) to enable efficient and high quality video transmissions with QoE analysis in dynamic inter-vehicles urban highway scenarios. The paper main contributions are the following: 1

Acknowledgment

E. Cerqueira is supported by The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and Fundao Amaznia Paraense de Amparo Pesquisa (FAPESPA).

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A distributed beaconless routing protocol for real-time video dissemination in multimedia VANETs

Highlights

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Related works

The proposed application framework and the Distributed Backbone Dissemination (DBD) protocol for Multimedia VANETs

Performance analysis

Conclusion

Acknowledgment

J. Network Comp. Appl.

Appl. Soft Comput.

J. Network Comp. Appl.

Ad Hoc Networks

Comp. Networks

Ad Hoc Networks

Vehicular communications: emergency video streams and network coding

J. Internet Serv. Appl.

Framework for the integrated video quality assessment

Multim. Tools Appl.