An Application-Centric Inter-Vehicle Routing Protocol for Video Streaming over Multi-Hop Urban VANETs

Service-oriented vehicular networks face challenge to deliver delay-sensitive data such as video packets. Most research works on video streaming consider network-centric quality of service (QoS) metrics rather than the user perceived quality. In this paper, we propose an application-centric routing framework for real-time video transmission over urban multi-hop vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) scenarios. Queueing based mobility model, spatial traffic distribution and probability of connectivity for sparse and dense VANET scenarios are taken into consideration in designing the routing protocol. The numerical results demonstrate the gain achieved by the proposed routing protocol versus geographic greedy forwarding in terms of video frame distortion and streaming start-up delay in several urban communication scenarios for various vehicle entrance rate and traffic densities.