Smoothness Constraint Based Stochastic Optimization for Wireless Scalable Video Streaming

The randomness of wireless channels, which may cause frequent interruption or fluctuation of video playback, is challenging for wireless video streaming. In this letter, a smoothness constraint based dynamic layer switching strategy is proposed for wireless scalable video streaming over a variable bitrate channel. It aims for optimizing long-term quality of users´ experience via maximizing video quality subject to a constraint on playback smoothness ( i.e., interruption and fluctuation). The proposed algorithm does not require a priori knowledge of the channel dynamics, and is capable of operating online with the currently available information. We further characterize the attainable performance of the proposed algorithm by theoretical analysis as well as experiments.