An improved multipath video data communication in a vehicular delay-tolerant network

Abstract

A vehicular network offers diverse beneficial services related to video streaming in different types of setups, including rural and urban. Some of the recent issues in vehicular communication include prospect of leveraging machine learning and blockchain for privacy and security enhancement, and resource allocation for video streaming coupled with integration of 6G networks for high data rate. Considering the extreme mobility and dynamic structure of vehicular networks and the high data rates of video streams, a unitary route may not support the required quality of a video stream. To achieve load balancing, connectivity among vehicles, path diversity, and low delay, the multipath transmission with a delay-tolerant network (DTN) concept based on a node disjoint algorithm is considered. In this proposed study, video frames are categorized in accordance with priority and forwarded via two graded paths. The first path carries the video reference frame, which is the most important frame for video decoding. The second path carries neighboring frames during video transmission. For the efficient selection of an optimal relay vehicle, a communication cost function is introduced into the existing DTN. This communication cost function is based on three key enhancement parameters: link stability rate, accessible bandwidth estimation, and transmission delay. The improvement in this study, is the integration of store-carry-forward strategy to the existing multipath data forwarding strategy. On the basis of the simulation outcomes, the proposed multipath video data communication in a vehicular DTN (MVDTN) scheme can enhance video data delivery in terms of packet loss ratio, end-to-end delay, structural similarity index measure, and peak signal-to-noise ratio. Considering the aforementioned metrics, our proposed schemes outperform the baseline schemes, namely, road-based multi-metrics forwarder selection evaluation for multipath video streaming and quality of service-aware multipath video streaming for an urban vehicular ad hoc network by using ant colony optimization.