IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2019 - 95

that provides video quality at substantially lower
bit rates compared to previous standards. A scalable extension of H.264/AVC, scalable video coding (SVC), was subsequently introduced to
provide different types of scalability attributes,
such as SNR, and spatial and temporal scalabilities. More recently, high efficiency video encoding (H.265/HEVC) has also been developed
providing about 50% bandwidth savings over
H.264/AVC9 at the cost of higher complexity at
the encoder and decoder. A scalable extension of
HEVC can also be used to achieve further efficiency by encoding segments in multiple layers,
as in SVC. The different links of a 5G network that
can be used for intelligent driving alongwith the
different video encoding schemes are discussed
in the following (see Figure 2):
Video encoding for V2V, V2I, and V2P links: The
various V2V, V2I, and V2P links share common limitations of the on-board vehicle platform in terms
of storage and computational capacity. The connected cars will require efficient V2X video encoding schemes. For instance, V2V streaming enables
vehicles to share their view of their surroundings,
thereby improving the navigation during poor
weather conditions and when large vehicles limit
the sensing range. In addition, V2X video streaming can alleviate network congestion if vehicles
are able to relay content. As such, it is not practical to use H.264/AVC, and due to the computational power or complexity of H.265, it may not be
a suitable technique as well (refer to Figure 3 for
comparison). In comparison, H.264/SVC provides
the benefit of reduced computational power and
lower memory requirements to store video segments and is therefore an attractive and a promising candidate for V2V/I/P communication.
Note that sending processed data instead of
videos will result in less data traffic but more onboard processing. Service evolution might dictate
which way to go-transmitting or processing the
raw data, as this may be situation or time dependent. For instance, it may depend on the amount
of energy left in the future smart electric vehicle
or the amount of available spectrum. Therefore,
each V2X link may have to be adapted to future
video or video-related information needs.
Video encoding for V2N communication link:
Besides the fiery growth in real-time video applications, ultrahigh definition videos, with 4K/8K

November/December 2019

Figure 2. Smart driving, cooperations, and interaction in 5G-V2X.

resolutions for infotainment are becoming common place. Such videos require efficient encoding particularly for the wireless channel, where
large capacity and bandwidths are expensive.
Therefore, H.265/HEVC, more efficient than
H.264, may be better suited for bandwidth
demanding content over a V2N link that provides
infotainment services. This, however, comes at
the cost of a higher complexity. An implementation of such an approach for 5G-based network
to vehicle communication is available.6 In this

Figure 3. Storage requirements for H.264/AVC versus H.264/
SVC; a 1 s video segment requires a total of 1.2 Mb storage if
encoded using AVC, but only 600 Kb using SVC, for three
different levels of quality.

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2019

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