Performance Evaluation of H.264 Video Streaming over Inter-Vehicular 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the performance of video streaming in inter-vehicular environments using the 802.11 ad hoc network protocol. We performed transmission experiments while driving two cars equipped with 802.11b standard devices in urban and highway scenarios. Different sequences, bitrates and packetization policies have been tested. The experiments show that each scenario presents peculiar characteristics in terms of average link availability and SNR, which can be exploited to develop more efficient applications. In this paper we also determine the best packetization policies for the two scenarios, showing that large packets lead to better performance in the highway scenario and vice versa. Perceptual quality results indicate that the best packetization policy achieves consistent gains in terms of PSNR values (up to 5 dB), and reduced quality variations, with respect to a fixed-policy transmission technique.