Predictive Handoff Mechanism for Video Streaming in a Cloud-Based Urban Vanet

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) offer a diversity of applications related especially to safety and entertainment. During the non-emergency periods, various multimedia applications can be employed, in this paper we focus on ameliorating the quality of video streaming downloaded by a moving vehicle. During the transmission of the video stream-ing, the vehicle switches from one RSU to another and may affect the perceived quality of the video. To minimize the dis-ruption, handover latency must be held to minimum values. This paper presents a predictive handoff mechanism based on estimation of the quality of link of neighboring RSUs. The main goal in this research is to minimize the time of handoff by minimizing the time of looking for the next RSU. The proposed mechanism is called Predictive Handoff Mechanism for Video streaming in cloud-based urban Vanet (PHMVV) where it is defined based on vehicle and RSU positions, the distance be-tween them, an RSUtable containing information of neighbor-ing RSUs and the quality of link of each RSU. The experiment of (PHMVV) is conducted using a network simulator, NS-3. The results are compared to SNR-based handoff where the vehicle waits until a threshold value of the SNR to trigger a handoff and search a next RSU. Our proposed approach reveals significant improvements on perceived video quality (PSNR and MOS), end-to-end delay and jitter.