K-Hop Packet Forwarding Schemes for Cooperative Video Streaming over Vehicular Networks

When a passenger in a vehicle wants to watch video during movement, he may request video through cellular network, e.g., 3G or 3.5G network. However, due to the characteristics of vehicular networks, the limited bandwidth of 3G/3.5G network is not enough to support high resolution or high video quality. In order to improve the quality of video playback, this vehicle, which is defined as requester in this paper, may try to ask other members of the same fleet to download video cooperatively. In other words, other members would download parts of requested video through their 3G/3.5G network individually and then forward video data hop by hop to the requester using the DSRC ad-hoc network. In order to smooth the DSRC ad-hoc network, we propose and discuss two k-hop packet forwarding schemes for the aforementioned cooperative video streaming over vehicular networks in this paper. Each intermediary node of the forwarding route must decide how to deliver buffered video data through the limited DSRC network. Finally, the NS2 simulation tool is adopted to evaluate the proposed schemes. Based on the simulation results, the Playback Priority First (PPF) scheme is performed better than the First-In First-Out (FIFO) scheme.