Optimizing the Transmission of Multimedia Content over Vehicular Networks

Abstract

The multi channel operation mechanism of the IEEE 1609.4 protocol, used in vehicular networks, may impact network performance if applications do not care about its details. Packets delivered from the application layer to the MAC layer during a Control Channel time slot have to wait to be transmitted until the following Service Channel time slot arrives. The accumulation of packets at the beginning of this time slot may introduce additional delays and higher collision rates when packets are transmitted. In this work we propose a method, which we call SkipCCH, that deals with this issue in order to make a better use of the wireless channel and, as a consequence, increase the overall network performance. With our proposal, streaming video in vehicular networks will provide better reconstructed quality at the receiver side under the same network conditions. Furthermore, this method has particularly proven its benefits when working with QoS techniques, not only by increasing the received video quality, but also because it avoids starvation of the lower priority traffic.