Performance Evaluation of Ad Hoc Multicast Routing Protocols to Facilitate Video Streaming in VANETS

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a type of mobile ad hoc network (MANET) that facilitates communication among vehicles. VANET provides inter-vehicular communications to serve for the application like road traffic safety and traffic efficiency. Infotainment service has been an anticipating trend in VANETs, and video streaming has a high potential in VANET. Although, this emerging technology is trending, there are still some issues like QoS provisions, decentralized medium access control, node coverage area, and finding and maintaining routes due to highly dynamic topology. These issues make multicast communication difficult in VANETs. Numerous routing protocols and routing strategies have been projected to cope with these issues. Lots of work has taken place to assess and measure the performances of these protocols in VANETs but these protocols are rarely analyzed for performance under stress of real time video multicast. In this study two different multicast routing protocols viz. Multicast Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (MAODV) and Protocol for Unified Multicasting through Announcements (PUMA) are evaluated for facilitating video streaming in VANETS. The protocols are examined against the QoS parameters such as Network Throughput, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Average end to end Delay, and Normalized Routing Load (NRL). Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic is used to evaluate the performances of protocol. PUMA, at the end, showed better performance against different QoS provisions in different scenarios