Distributed scheduling scheme for video streaming over multi-channel multi-radio multi-hop wireless networks

Abstract

An important issue of supporting multi-user video streaming over wireless networks is how to optimize the systematic scheduling by intelligently utilizing the available network resources while, at the same time, to meet each video's Quality of Service (QoS) requirement. In this work, we study the problem of video streaming over multi-channel multi-radio multihop wireless networks, and develop fully distributed scheduling schemes with the goals of minimizing the video distortion and achieving certain fairness. We first construct a general distortion model according to the network¿s transmission mechanism, as well as the rate distortion characteristics of the video. Then, we formulate the scheduling as a convex optimization problem, and propose a distributed solution by jointly considering channel assignment, rate allocation, and routing. Specifically, each stream strikes a balance between the selfish motivation of minimizing video distortion and the global performance of minimizing network congestions. Furthermore, we extend the proposed scheduling scheme by addressing the fairness problem. Unlike prior works that target at users' bandwidth or demand fairness, we propose a media-aware distortion-fairness strategy which is aware of the characteristics of video frames and ensures max-min distortion-fairness sharing among multiple video streams. We provide extensive simulation results which demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed schemes.