Rate scheduling of multimedia streams over parallel wireless data channels with heterogeneous reliability

A rate scheduling method for multimedia connections over parallel wireless channels with heterogeneous reliability is developed. Transmissions of different parts of a multimedia stream with different level of error tolerance over a wireless channel that support multiple links with heterogeneous reliability can improve the flexibility in resource allocation and increase the number of multimedia streams admitted by the system while satisfying the QoS requirement of each connection. To address this transmission scenario, we present and evaluate a novel dynamic resource-allocation method that decomposes the available resources into two sets of links, one with higher reliability (lower BER) than other, and allocates the links to the respective parts of each multimedia connection. We mathematically formulate a rate scheduling problem for the flexible transmission scenario and develop an efficient real-time resource allocation algorithm with a remarkably fast rate of convergence. Simulation results show that the proposed method improves: the number of multimedia connections by 1.25%-34.6% according to the error rate in wireless link; the average number of multimedia connections that experience errors per frame by 1%-70%for low rate connections and by 5%-14%for high rate connections