A fair and adaptive scheduling protocol for video stream transmission in mobile environment

We propose an adaptive buffer sensitive (ABS) protocol for scheduling transmission of video streams over a mobile network. Two important considerations in the design of ABS are: (1) to minimize the impact of transient overloading and communication errors on video playback; and (2) to minimize the impact of a video playback on the playback of other video streams. In ABS, the allocation of network bandwidth for serving client requests is divided into two phases. In the first phase, a minimum bandwidth is allocated to serve each request with an aim to minimize the impact of a video request on the performance of other requests. The allocation of bandwidth in the second phase is based on the playback buffer levels of the clients in order to make the system more adaptive to the playback status of individual client. Extensive simulation experiments have been performed to investigate the performance of ABS under different network failure probabilities.