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Live multicast video streaming from drones: an experimental study

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Abstract

We present and evaluate a multicast framework for point-to-multipoint and multipoint-to-point-to-multipoint video streaming that is applicable if both source and receiver nodes are mobile. Receiver nodes can join a multicast group by selecting a particular video stream and are dynamically elected as designated nodes based on their signal quality to provide feedback about packet reception. We evaluate the proposed application-layer rate-adaptive multicast video streaming over an aerial ad-hoc network that uses IEEE 802.11, a desirable protocol that, however, does not support a reliable multicast mechanism due to its inability to provide feedback from the receivers. Our rate-adaptive approach outperforms legacy multicast in terms of goodput, delay, and packet loss. Moreover, we obtain a gain in video quality (PSNR) of \(30\%\) for point-to-multipoint and of \(20\%\) for multipoint-to-point-to-multipoint streaming.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Arke Vogell and Micha Rappaport for acting as pilots for the test scenarios.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lakeside Labs GmbH, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Raheeb Muzaffar, Evşen Yanmaz, Christian Raffelsberger & Christian Bettstetter

  2. Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Evşen Yanmaz

  3. Institute of Networked and Embedded Systems, Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Christian Bettstetter

  4. Centre for Intelligent Sensing, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Andrea Cavallaro

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  1. Raheeb Muzaffar
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  2. Evşen Yanmaz
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  3. Christian Raffelsberger
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  4. Christian Bettstetter
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  5. Andrea Cavallaro
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Correspondence to Raheeb Muzaffar.

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This work is funded by the security research programme KIRAS of the Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation, and Technology (bmvit), Austria under the grant agreement n. 854747 (WatchDog) and ICT of the future programme (4th call) of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under grant agreement n. 855468 (ForestiMate). The support of the UK EPSRC project NCNR (EP/R02572X/1) and EACEA Agency of the European Commission under EMJD ICE FPA n. 2010-0012 is also acknowledged. The work of Evsen Yanmaz was performed while being employed at Lakeside Labs GmbH, Klagenfurt, Austria.

This is one of the several papers published in Autonomous Robots comprising Special Issue on Robot Communication Challenges: Real-World Problems, Systems, and Methods.

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Muzaffar, R., Yanmaz, E., Raffelsberger, C. et al. Live multicast video streaming from drones: an experimental study. Auton Robot 44, 75–91 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-019-09851-6

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