Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have been mainly motivated for safety applications, but non-safety applications can also be very helpful to impulse vehicular networks. Among non-safety applications, video streaming services can provide attractive features to many applications and can attract a great number of users. However, VANETs high mobility characteristics and packet loss during communications blackouts difficult the deployment of video services in vehicular networks. In this paper, the performance of a video streaming service has been analyzed to study the deployability of a video on demand service in a highway environment for vehicular users. It has been analyzed the packet loss produced by network reconfiguration during handoffs and its influence in the video streamed quality. Using Mobile IP without and with fast handoffs we have gauge the effects of mobility over the video transmission. We show that although fast handoffs techniques minimize blackouts, they limit the deployment of video streaming services in vehicular networks.

Peer Reviewed