Accompanying the increasing interest on Vehicle Adhoc Networks (VANETs), there is a request for high quality and real-time video streaming on a VANET, for safety and infotainment applications. Video Streaming on a VANET faces extra issues, comparing to the video streaming on a Mobile Ad-hocNetwork (MANET), like the highly dynamic topology. However, there are also benefits in VANETs, like large buffer and battery capacity, predictable motion of vehicles and powerful CPU and GPU. However the high packet loss ratio of a VANET is a critical issue for high quality video streaming. In this work, we propose an error recovery process for high quality and real time video streaming in a VANET, which is call Multi-channel Error Recovery Video Streaming (MERVS).
MERVS transmits the video through two different channels: reliable channel and unreliable channel. Because the importance of the I-frames in terms of video quality, I-frames will be transmitted through the reliable channel. The inter frames will be transmitted through the unreliable channel, because the limited resource of the reliable channel. The Priority Queue, Quick Start and Scalable Reliable Channel (SRC) techniques are also integrated to improve the delay of MERVS. Based on the conducted simulation results, MERVS can provide higher quality video streaming comparing to Forward Error Correction (FEC) with the similar time delay compared with the RTP/UDP in a VANET.