AN ADAPTIVE LIVE STREAMING MECHANISM FOR HETEROGENEOUS VEHICULAR NETWORKS

With the popularity of vehicular networks, how to maintain high quality of the seamless live streaming service is a great challenge. In this work, an adaptive seamless live streaming dissemination system for heterogeneous vehicular networks to tackle this challenging issue is presented. First, differential service is presented in this work to ensure that paid users can satisfy the live steaming service. Based on users' service-level agreement, an adaptive bandwidth allocation policy is proposed in this work to attain seamless handoff. In addition, because vehicles enter into the areas of hotspots, we also present a mechanism not only to prevent the insufficient bandwidth in advance, but also to make sure the paid users have higher priority than free users to obtain the seamless streaming service. When an unavoidable congestion occurs, we compress the streaming videos with a Region of Interest approach based on the content and characters of the video in order to maintain the service quality of paid users and reduce the required bandwidth for the streaming services. A series of simulation results show that our mechanism achieves better performance in terms of bandwidth utilization, packet loss ratio, and blocking probability. The capability of self-adaption in volatile real-time vehicular environment assists in the effectiveness and practicability of our proposed approach.