Improved support for streaming services in vehicular networks

This paper presents a resource management mechanism aimed at improving the effectiveness of streaming services in vehicular networks. The scenario considered in this paper is that of a group of customers located into a same public vehicle, e.g. a moving train connected to the network via a satellite link, and requesting either video-on-demand-like services, as well as real-time diffusive (broadcast) streaming services. We show that a proxy server, devised to introduce an elastic buffer aimed at decoupling the information retrieval download speed on the outer network from the natural play-out speed used in the vehicular network, results to be an extremely effective approach in reducing the outage probability given by link failure in the outer network (e.g. tunnel crossing). A resource management mechanism, called A2M, is applied to both video-on-demand and diffusive services, and its performance effectiveness is evaluated through simulation.