Abstract
Recently, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have been providing a number of services for on-road users, including video content retrieval using 3G and 4G networks. However, owing to the highly dynamic network topology of VANETs, such services is highly susceptible to poor performance. In such a real-time scenario, a requesting vehicle may not be able to guarantee the video quality using its own wireless interface independently. Thus, motivated to provide a quality video stream, we propose a Fleet Based video Retrieval (FBR) scheme that allows the requesting vehicle to download the H.264/SVC encoded video stream in collaboration with its 1-hop neighbors. The collaborators are selected considering the multiple characteristics of each neighboring vehicle, i.e., 1-hop distance, link duration, velocity, and the available cellular bandwidth. The selected vehicles download the video data using their wireless link and then forward it to the requested vehicle through a Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) protocol. For comparison, we first evaluate our FBR with 3G equipped vehicles and secondly, we designed FBR to work in 4G/LTE environment. Through simulations, we found that FBR has outperformed the recently proposed scheme in terms of receiving video quality and video-flow handling.