Anticipatory quality-resource allocation for multi-user mobile video streaming

Mobile video delivery forms the largest part of the traffic in cellular networks. Thus optimizing the resource allocation to satisfy a user´s quality of experience is becoming paramount in modern communications. This paper belongs to the line of research known as anticipatory networking that makes use of prediction of wireless capacity to improve communication performance. In particular, we focus on the problem of optimal resource allocation for steady video delivery under maximum average quality constraints for multiple users. We formulate the problem as a piecewise linear program and provide a heuristic algorithm, which solution is close to optimal. Based on our formulation we are now able to trade off minimum video quality, average quality and offered network capacity.