Streaming Support for Vehicular Networks Using Elastic Proxy Buffers

In this work we focus on vehicular area networks. A group of customers, located into a same public vehicle, is connected to the terrestrial network through a satellite backbone connectivity. We propose to deploy on-board proxies, which rely on elastic buffering mechanisms as a mean to decouple the multimedia information retrieval rate on the network backbone from the play-out streaming rate at the user terminal. We show that elastic buffering is an extremely effective mean to reduce, or even eliminate, streaming service outage due to intermittent backbone connectivity, such that occurring when a vehicle crosses tunnels. Moreover, we show that elastic buffering is not only a technique suitable for multimedia information retrieval services, but it can be effectively applied to delayed real-time services.