QoE-driven user-centric VoD services in urban multi-homed P2P-based vehicular networks

Recently many cities around the world have witnessed large scale deployment of terrestrial broadcasting mobile TV to vehicles. This service is similar to the cable or satellite television already watched at home and user-centric interactive mobile Video-on-Demand (VoD) over urban vehicular networks is in fact expected. However providing this new service with focus on user Quality of Experience (QoE) constitutes a significant challenge. This paper introduces a QoE-driven User-centric solution for VoD services in urban vehicular network environments (QUVoD). QUVoD relies on a multi-homed hierarchical peer-topeer (P2P) and vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) architecture. Vehicles construct a low layer VANET via WAVE interfaces and also form an upper layer P2P Chord overlay on top of a cellular network via 4G interfaces. A novel grouping-based storage strategy is proposed which distributes uniformly the video segments along the Chord overlay, reducing segment seeking traffic, while also enabling load-balancing. A novel segment seeking and multipath delivery scheme is also introduced which achieves high lookup success rate and very good video data delivery efficiency. Furthermore, a new speculation-based prefetching strategy is proposed, which analyses users’ interactive viewing behavior and, by estimating video segment playback order, employs pre-fetching of the expected segments, smoothening the video playback. Simulation results show how QUVoD.