Video Streaming Over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks Using Erasure Coding

Video streaming over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is an attractive application that provides many useful services for drivers. However, many problems need resolving, most of which are related to packet delay and packet loss. Due to the specific environment of VANETs, it is difficult to apply conventional protocols originally developed for the Internet, such as Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). Previous research works have offered many new protocols to solve this problem. However, most of them cannot make full use of existing Internet video-streaming resources like RTP players and servers. In this paper, we propose the converter model to solve this compatibility issue. Based on this model, we first modify the RTP using the erasure coding (EC) technique to address the high packet loss rate of VANETs. This protocol is known as EC-RTP. Then, we develop two converters; the first stands on the boundary between the Internet and VANETs. It receives the RTP packets from the Internet and translates them to EC-RTP packets, which are shared between vehicles. The second converter receives EC-RTP packets, translates them back to RTP packets, and then sends them to the RTP player.