Providing entertainment app lications in VANET environments

With vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications gaining momentum, immense opportunities for developing a new application gamut open up. These range from applications targeting security/safety and efficient transportation to in-car entertainment enjoying multi-player mixed-reality games. The potential of VANETs has been recognized by standardization bodies and other stakeholders, including car manufacturers, that have established multiple consortia and initiatives to explore the capabilities of VANET technologies. From the communication technology perspective, the high speed at which nodes move in VANETs together with the adverse environmental conditions (rapidly changing surroundings, weather, etc.) present great challenges. These have attracted the interest of researchers who have sought to evaluate the performance of these systems, mostly paying attention to the lower layers of the protocol stack (physical and MAC). In this article, we explore the network architecture and protocol stack for supporting a broad range of infotainment applications in VANETs based on IEEE 802.11p and assess VANETs’ capabilities to support networked multimedia. To this end, our evaluation focuses on application-layer performance for video streaming over a prototype system based on NEC’s Linkbird-MX devices.