QoE of Video Streaming in Multihomed Vehicular Networks

With the ever-increasing interest and availability of vehicular networks, it comes now of importance to study the Quality-of-Experience (QoE) provided by these networks. Either motivated by safety or commercial applications, video streaming in such highly mobile environments offers multiple challenges. In this paper we evaluate the QoE of a multihoming communication strategy, supported simultaneously by WAVE and Wi-Fi, for increasing the reliability and performance of video streams in these environments. Furthermore, we also investigate how distinct network functionalities, such as multihoming load balance, buffering, throughput and latency affect the overall QoE observed. The results obtained led to the proposal of a multihoming load balance rule for video applications based on access technologies, aiming to improve QoE. The overall results show a QoE improvement by using the proposed approach.