A cross layer approach for efficient multimedia data dissemination in VANETs

The recent rapid expansion of multimedia applications spectrum, ranging from infotainment to healthcare and mission-critical scenarios, has incited researchers from different disciplines to develop various tools and protocols to support such applications. Many people use multimedia data while they travel in different transportation means and thus they need various QoS levels based on the type of application they are running. Such data is usually transmitted through 3G/LTE networks; however, the unprecedented increase of multimedia data volume makes satisfying their requirements in terms of low delay and higher bandwidth a challenge. Many experts foresee that Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) technology can be an efficient offloading solution for 3G/LTE networks by providing cost-free and robust data exchange between cars as well as among their passengers. Although VANETs pave the way toward several novel safety and non-safety applications that promise enhanced driving security and comfort, they suffer from several issues due to their intrinsic features such as higher vehicles mobility, rapidly changing topology, etc. In this work, we propose an Enhanced version of AODV (En-AODV) protocol to deal with routes instability issue in VANETs. En-AODV leverages cross-layer information on the link quality combined with the knowledge of the final destination of the receiver vehicle to establish more stable routes. The obtained simulation results confirm the efficiency of En-AODV and highlight its supremacy over AODV under various metrics and scenarios. En-AODV has particularly proven its ability to establish stable routes while significantly reduce the overhead generated by control packets, freeing up the channel to carry more data packets.