Availability-Aware Multimedia Scheduling in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Scheduling multimedia applications over heterogeneous wireless networks is a challenging issue due to quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, different resource requests, and dynamically available network resources. Resource availability is an important constraint for the adaptive usage of limited network resources. However, it has not been well studied in the literature. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed availability-aware adaptive rate-allocation scheme for multimedia applications. A general distortion model is first proposed, which is highly dependent on the application´s rate-distortion characteristics and the availability model. Then, a near-optimal rate-allocation approach is presented that jointly considers QoS, reliability, and availability. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme is able to achieve higher QoS under various environments compared with other reference approaches.