RMV: Real-time multi-view video streaming in highway vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs)

Broadcasting of real-time video, especially accidents relevant, plays an important role in Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). Multi-view video enables the perception of the targeted scene from multiple angles. By subscribing the real-time multi-view video broadcast, drivers can obtain better knowledge of the highway traffic and road conditions. However, compared with the traditional single view video transmission, the multiview video transmission is more challenging, because of the VANETs' channel variation and a much larger network data rate requirement. The inherent problem thus becomes how to utilize the limited network bandwidth to stream the real-time multi-view video. As far as the authors understand, this problem has not yet been solved in any formal way. This paper focuses on the realtime multi-view broadcast over VANETs and formulates it into an optimization problem with the objective to maximize the average video quality received by users. By exploring the VANET channel characteristic, the correlations inside the multi-view and video popularity, an algorithm named as RMV is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Extensive simulations are conducted and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can outperform the comparison schemes in typical VANET scenarios to a great extent.