Video on Demand in IEEE 802.11p-based Vehicular Networks: Analysis and Dimensioning

We consider a VoD (Video on-Demand) platform designed for vehicles traveling on a highway or other major roadway. Typically, cars or buses would subscribe to this delivery service so that their passengers get access to a catalog of movies and series stored on a back-end server. Videos are delivered through IEEE 802.11p Road Side Units deployed along the highway. In this paper, we propose a simple analytical and yet accurate solution to estimate (at the speed of a click) two key performance parameters for a VoD platform: (i) the total amount of data downloaded by a vehicle over its journey and (ii) the total "interruption time'', which corresponds to the time a vehicle spends with the playback of its video interrupted because of an empty buffer. After validating its accuracy against a set of simulations run with ns-3, we show an example of application of our analytical solution for the sizing of an IEEE 802.11p-based VoD platform.