QoE-Optimal Scheduling for On-Demand Video Streams over Unreliable Wireless Networks

Video streaming is anticipated to dominate wireless traffic in the near future. We study wireless systems where an access point delivers video streams to multiple clients over unreliable wireless channels. The performance of each client is measured by the amount of time that its video playback halts due to buffer underflow, which has been shown to have the most impact on client’s perceived quality of experience (QoE). We develop an analytical framework that jointly captures the video playback process and the unreliable and heterogeneous wireless channels. We derive the capacity region for QoE by establishing a lower bound of a weighted sum of video halt durations over all clients. We then propose a QoE-optimal policy that can achieve every point within the capacity region. Finally, we compare our policy against two commonly used policies. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results show that our policy greatly outperforms other policies. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: I-Hong Hou, Ping-Chun Hsieh
• Keywords: Computer Networks, MOBIHOC 2015