Cost-effective live video streaming for internet of connected vehicles using heterogeneous networks

Smart vehicles of Internet of Connected Vehicles (IoCV) create Ad-Hoc networks and are persistently connected to the Internet through different network access technologies like Wifi, cellular, and dedicated short range communication (DSRC). A vehicle may prefer one network access technology over another based on availability, coverage area, and network access cost. The choice also depends on application requirements, like delay -tolerant or delay-sensitive, and application objectives, like maximizing data rate, maximizing cellular traffic offloading, etc. Cellular traffic offloading using Wifi access points and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) collaborations are very challenging due to the intermittent short coverage areas of Wifi access points and highly dynamic connectivity of V2V Ad-Hoc network. Most existing works on traffic offloading have considered delay-tolerant or on-demand services, whereas delay-constrained live video streaming services are mostly ignored. This work is focused on live video streaming services over IoCVs, where the non-triviality of the network selection task is demonstrated by formulating the task as an integer linear programming problem (ILPP). Accordingly, a distributed algorithm is proposed, which greedily maximizes cellular traffic offloading while significantly reducing the control packet overheads. Compared to existing works, the proposed work provides the best service effectiveness with a balanced performance on traffic offloading, service efficiency, and user satisfaction.