A Burst Effort Broadcasting Approach of MPEG-4 Video Transmission for Intervehicle Communication

Efficient and real-time video broadcasting helps to improve driving safety and to make traveling fun for drivers. However, it is hard to structure vehicles into permanent network topologies and schedules to broadcast video streaming real-time in intervehicle communication (IVC) in a high-mobility vehicular environment. In order to achieve this, we have designed a burst effort broadcasting (BEB) approach for IVC, which considers the challenges of high mobility and multihop broadcast, as well as the features of MPEG-4 video streams to adapt to highway scenarios. The BEB approach is distributed in real time without protocol overhead and comprises a queuing procedure and a scheduling scheme. The queuing procedure consists of the preprocess of video transmission, including the video shaping of groups of pictures and sequential reordering video frames. Based on the queuing procedure, a mobility-adaptive scheduler is applied to handle the broadcast and rebroadcast of the video stream. The concept of macroscopic broadcast is utilized to increase the broadcast performance and the video perceived quality of service (PQoS), and to reduce the number of unnecessary redundant broadcasts. As an evaluation, the real MPEG-4 video was conducted in simulation and the broadcast performance was compared with another protocol by the metrics of peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and loss of video frames in different broadcasting scenarios. Then, the results were analyzed. The simulation proved that this approach is an efficient multihop broadcast solution that does indeed provide a realistic solution to promote a higher degree of video PQoS on highways.