Sensors, Vol. 18, Pages 3495: Error Resilient Coding Techniques for Video Delivery over Vehicular Networks (Sensors)

Nowadays, more and more vehicles are equipped with communication capabilities, not only providing connectivity with onboard devices, but also with off-board communication infrastructures. From road safety (i.e., multimedia e-call) to infotainment (i.e., video on demand services), there are a lot of applications and services that may be deployed in vehicular networks, where video streaming is the key factor. As it is well known, these networks suffer from high interference levels and low available network resources, and it is a great challenge to deploy video delivery applications which provide good quality video services. We focus our work on supplying error resilience capabilities to video streams in order to fight against the high packet loss rates found in vehicular networks. So, we propose the combination of source coding and channel coding techniques. The former ones are applied in the video encoding process by means of intra-refresh coding modes and tile-based frame partitioning techniques. The latter one is based on the use of forward error correction mechanisms in order to recover as many lost packets as possible. We have carried out an extensive evaluation process to measure the error resilience capabilities of both approaches in both (a) a simple packet error probabilistic model, and (b) a realistic vehicular network simulation framework. Results show that forward error correction mechanisms are mandatory to guarantee video delivery with an acceptable quality level , and we highly recommend the use of the proposed mechanisms to increase even more the final video quality.