QoE-Driven User-Centric VoD Services in Urban Multihomed P2P-Based Vehicular Networks

Recently, many cities around the world have witnessed large-scale deployment of terrestrial broadcasting mobile television (TV) to vehicles. This service is similar to the cable or satellite TV already in the 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 multihomed hierarchical peer-to-peer (P2P) and vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) architecture. Vehicles construct a low-layer VANET via Wireless Access in the Vehicular Environment interfaces; they also form an upper layer P2P Chord overlay on top of a cellular network via Fourth-Generation (4G) interfaces. A novel grouping-based storage strategy that uniformly distributes the video segments along the Chord overlay is proposed, reducing segment seeking traffic while also enabling load balancing. A novel segment seeking and multipath delivery scheme that achieves high lookup success rate and very good video data delivery efficiency 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 prefetching of the expected segments, smoothening the video playback. Simulation results show how QUVoD is a highly efficient user-centric mobile VoD solution in urban vehicular networks in comparison with existing state-of-the-art solutions.