Author :
Miller, Konstantin ; Bethanabhotla, Dilip ; Caire, Giuseppe ; Wolisz, Adam
Abstract :
Recently, the way people consume video content has been undergoing a dramatic change. Plain TV sets, that have been the center of home entertainment for a long time, are losing ground to hybrid TVs, PCs, game consoles, and, more recently, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The new predominant paradigm is: watch what I want, when I want, and where I want. The challenges of this shift are manifold. On the one hand, broadcast technologies such as DVB-T/C/S need to be extended or replaced by mechanisms supporting asynchronous viewing, such as IPTV and video streaming over best-effort networks, while remaining scalable to millions of users. On the other hand, the dramatic increase of wireless data traffic begins to stretch the capabilities of the existing wireless infrastructure to its limits. Finally, there is a challenge to video streaming technologies to cope with a high heterogeneity of end-user devices and dynamically changing network conditions, in particular in wireless and mobile networks. In the present work, our goal is to design an efficient system that supports a high number of unicast streaming sessions in a dense wireless access network. We address this goal by jointly considering the two problems of wireless transmission scheduling and video quality adaptation, using techniques inspired by the robustness and simplicity of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers. We show that the control-theoretic approach allows to efficiently utilize available wireless resources, providing high quality of experience (QoE) to a large number of users.
Keywords :
digital video broadcasting; quality of experience; radio networks; smart phones; telecommunication control; three-term control; video streaming; DVB-T/C/S; IPTV; PID controllers; adaptive video streaming; asynchronous viewing; best-effort networks; broadcast technologies; control-theoretic approach; dense wireless access network; dense wireless networks; end-user devices; game consoles; home entertainment; hybrid TV; mobile devices; mobile networks; network conditions; plain TV sets; proportional-integral-derivative controller; quality of experience; smartphones; tablets; unicast streaming sessions; video content; video quality adaptation; wireless data traffic; wireless infrastructure; wireless resources; wireless transmission scheduling; Adaptation models; Quality assessment; Streaming media; Throughput; Video recording; Wireless networks; HTTP-based adaptive streaming; MPEG-DASH; small-cell wireless networks; streaming media;