Multimedia Data Offloading in Resource-Limited Multi-Hop Vehicular Networks

Abstract

As big data proliferates, the old "SneakerNet" technique has resurfaced as a viable option where data is stored on some sort of storage drive at the source location and the storage drive is physically taken to the destination point, rather than transmitting the data over a network. Validation experiments in a resource-limited, RF-challenged multi-hop communications environment were completed to demonstrate the transmission time gains that can be achieved when the file size to be transferred is large enough to make it advantageous to offload traffic to a close-by vehicle and physically moving the data to multiple points rather than directly transmitting from point to point. The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was used to encode files that were then corrupted with the acquired packet loss rates from the field tests and decoded to obtain the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNR). The high compression ratios that the HEVC standard can obtain makes HEVC-encoded video vulnerable to the effects of packet losses when transmitted in challenging wireless communication environments.