Power budgeted packet scheduling for wireless multimedia

In this paper we profile a particular tradeoff between power budget and video quality that emerges in the transmission of multimedia packets over a wireless channel. These packets are due to arrive to a receiver at a particular time, so we consider a finite horizon problem over which multimedia data are transmitted. Due to the lossy nature of the wireless channel, however, not every packet can be successfully sent across the channel. Hence, each packet that is lost leads to distortion in the video that is experienced by the receiver. We suppose that there are M packets that must arrive at the receiver within N time steps, but that power limitations constrain the number of transmissions. At each time step, we may make a measurement of the wireless channel and decide whether or not to transmit a packet over the channel at that time. First we will suppose the times at which the channel state is sampled are spaced far enough apart so that the samples are i.i.d. Then we will continue by supposing that the channel state follows a Markov chain.