Asking neighbors a favor: Cooperative video retrieval using cellular networks in VANETs

Abstract In the future networks, driven by the constant evolution of today's applications, video streaming over vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) will play an increasingly significant role in our daily life. Many users already consider the video streaming service, among other services, as a necessity. However, due to the limited bandwidth of a connection through a cellular network, a vehicle may not be able to obtain a good quality of service (QoS). In order to receive a good quality video, a vehicle in VANET may ask its neighbors a favor in helping to download the video. In this paper, we therefore propose a COoperative video REtrieval scheme (CoRe) that allows the vehicles to download a good quality video from the Internet in collaboration with the neighbors. The neighbors are selected by exploiting their multiple on-road characteristics such as euclidean distance, connection time, relative velocity, and the available cellular bandwidth. These neighboring vehicles download the video data through their cellular link and forward it to the requesting vehicle through the Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) protocol. Simulation results show that our proposed CoRe scheme outperforms the existing solution such as the K-hop scheme in terms of higher video quality and better video-flow handling.