Video streaming transfer in a smart satellite mobile environment

In the near future, transportation media are likely to become "smart spaces", where sophisticated services are offered to the passengers. Among such services, we concentrate on video streaming provided on buses that move in urban, suburban, or highway environments. A contents' source utilizes a satellite DVB-S2 link for transmitting video streams to a bus, which, in its turn, relays it to its passengers' devices. A bus works in a smart mode taking advantage of the knowledge of the exact points where it will not receive the satellite signal for a certain time period, due to fixed obstacles. 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 degradation, seamlessly compensates channel blockages up to a given duration. In this paper, we determine the most appropriate transmission parameters for video streaming with good video quality of service (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.