Performance Study of Live Video Streaming Over Highway Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Live video streaming over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) is an attractive feature to many applications, such as emergency live video transmission, road-side video advertisement broadcasting and inter-vehicle video conversation. Though vehicles have ample bandwidth, computation and storage capacity to support data intensive communication, the high mobility may cause persistent network partition. The performance of video streaming suffers from the delay and packet loss incurred by the long time disconnection. Although many solutions have been proposed to handle the high mobility problem, few of them addressed the problem in the context of video transmission. In this paper, we focus on video streaming between vehicles in highway, where the traffic density is adequate to mitigate frequent link disconnections and persistent network partitions. We study the performance of video streaming under different data forwarding and buffer management schemes. Real video data and the dedicated short range communications (DSRC) are used in the simulation study to better match the reality. The result of this paper gives insight for the design of the future inter-vehicle video streaming system.