An evaluation environment and methodology for automotive media streaming applications

Media streaming in automotive environments is becoming more important with the proliferation of 3G/4G technologies and the general demand for consuming Internet content in cars. Especially the rising popularity of Music on Demand and Media Cloud Storage services pushes automotive manufactures efforts to provide decent music streaming capabilities in vehicles. Two major issues have to be tackled to achieve this goal. (1) Weak or even uncovered areas in tunnels, underpasses or urban canyons. (2) Exhausted mobile network capabilities at crowded spots. Buffering can help to overcome the first issue. However, it consequently worsens the second issue due to its additional bandwidth demand. For this reason, the implementation of reasonable music streaming solutions in the car needs novel prefetching algorithms which reduce caching to the minimum and optimize bandwidth sharing between users. In this paper, we present a comprehensive simulation environment and evaluation methodology to develop and assess such prefetching algorithms.