Joint Video Delivery with Roadside Access Points for On-Road Infotainment

The concept of on-road video services aims to provide infotainments to drivers/passengers during their trip. Instead of using paid services such as 3G/LTE/WiMAX communication technologies or exclusive Mobile TV Systems, free road-side APs can also be utilized to deliver videos available on the Internet to mobile users for cost saving. However, whether this approach can provide satisfactory user experience is a fundamental problem to be studied. We introduce a new performance metric called User Experience Index (UEI) for on-road video services, which takes the following into design consideration: 1) whether users can enjoy video services during their entire traveling; and 2) whether videos have been interrupted during display. With UEI, we focus on optimizing video delivery with multiple road-side APs by addressing the Joint Video Delivery Problem (JVDP) with the objective being to maximize the average UEI (AUEI) of all users through dynamic AP bandwidth allocation. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first on improving user experience for on-road video services. Two heuristic algorithms are proposed and numerical results from large-scale simulation are also presented.