Enhancing Path Stability Towards the Provision of Multimedia Support in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The recent advances and wide availability of wireless access technologies and inter-vehicle communication systems are expected to culminate in the integration of different wireless networks such as the IEEE 802.11, 3G/4G, and WiMax, multimedia and sensor networks in the next generation vehicular networks. However, due to high mobility of vehicles, several issues remain to be resolved before real-time multimedia based applications over VANETs become a reality. In this paper, we propose to study the provision of multimedia support in VANET, and present an efficient Path Stability Protocol, which we refer to as PASTA, as an additional module to MAC layer protocols that aims at preventing path breaks between vehicles that are frequently within reach of each other but not necessarily on a continuous basis. We discuss the implementation of our protocol, and report on its performance evaluation using a wide range of realistic scenarios. Our results indicate that our PASTA protocol decreases significantly the end-to-end latency as well as the network jitter.