Video Streaming Transfer in a Smart Satellite Mobile Environment

Transportation media are becoming "smart spaces", where sophisticated services are offered to the passengers. We concentrate on video streaming provided on buses that move in urban, suburban, or highway environments. A content provider utilizes a DVB-S2 satellite link for transmitting video streams to a bus, where they are relayed to passengers' devices. We say that a bus works in smart mode if it takes advantage of the knowledge of the exact points where fixed obstacles will prevent receiving the satellite signal for a certain time period. This information is sent to the hub via a return channel. The hub, in its turn, suspends the transmissions to that specific bus for the given time interval, thus avoiding information losses and unnecessary bandwidth occupation. Buffering video packets, without any quality of service (QoS) degradation, seamlessly compensates channel blockages up to a given duration. We determine the most appropriate transmission parameters for video streaming with good video QoS in a mobile satellite environment; moreover, we evaluate how "smart" the system can be in terms of bandwidth saving, by comparing it with the situation where the bus does not exploit the description of its route, still maintaining the same QoS requirements. Copyright (C) 2009 Nedo Celandroni et al.