Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 22Robust Content Broadcasting in Vehicular Networks

Giancarlo Fortino¹, Carlos T. Calafate², Juan C. Cano², and Pietro Manzoni²

¹University of Calabria, Rende (CS), Italy

²Universitat Politècnica de València, Valencia, Spain

22.1 Introduction

In the past years, there has been a growing interest in exploiting wireless technology to enable interaction among vehicles, and between infrastructures and vehicles, for the purpose of improving road safety, managing the vehicular traffic, and assisting drivers during their travel with entertainment and useful information (e.g., accident warnings, road alerts, and traffic information). Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) [1, 2] have been specifically introduced to cope with the aforementioned purposes. VANETs are mobile ad hoc networks that support the communication among neighbor vehicles and can be extended to support communication between vehicles and infrastructures placed in the surrounding environment.

In particular, VANETs can effectively support in-vehicle infotainment, that is, information-based media content or programming that also includes entertainment content in an effort to enhance popularity with audiences and consumers. In the context of VANETs, infotainment is usually transmitted through broadcast-based systems that deliver contents using unidirectional links from antennas to vehicles in mobility [3].

Such systems are affected by several issues that make them difficult to be designed and implemented: lossy communication ...