Co-SVC-MDC-based cooperative video streaming over vehicular networks

When a vehicle requests a video streaming service from the Internet, it may not have enough bandwidth to receive good video quality. In order to resolve this problem, the vehicle is proposed to ask neighboring vehicles to help the video download process using a short-range wireless technique, i.e. Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRCs). In this paper, this scenario is called cooperative streaming over vehicular networks. Since the topology of vehicular networks changes over time rapidly, three critical issues in the moving-vehicle-based cooperative streaming are: (i) how to form a cooperative group dynamically, (ii) how to schedule neighboring vehicles to help the video download process and (iii) how to estimate the possible change of network conditions. We propose corresponding control schemes to tackle the aforementioned issues in this paper. From the simulation results, we can find that different scheduling schemes are adaptive to different scenarios, and the proposed dynamic group formation scheme has better performance than that of periodic group formation scheme.