A cooperative video streaming system over the integrated cellular and DSRC networks

Due to the advance of wireless and mobile technologies, vehicular networks are widely discussed in recent years. When a vehicle requests a video stream from the Internet using the cellular network, i.e., 3G or 3.5G network, it may not have enough bandwidth to receive good quality of video. In order to resolve this problem, the vehicle can ask neighboring vehicles for the help of downloading the video stream. This scenario is called cooperative streaming in vehicular communications. The vehicle can communicate with neighboring vehicles using a short-range wireless technique, e.g., Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). Since the topology of vehicle networks changes rapidly, two critical issues in the moving vehicle-based cooperative streaming are (1) how to form a cooperative group dynamically and (2) how to schedule neighboring vehicles to help the video downloading process. The simulation results reveal that the improvement of video quality is proportional to (1) high traffic flow, (2) high probability of willingness to share bandwidth and (3) low relative speed.