Predictive cost-based scheduling for scalable media streaming

We propose a scheduling policy, called Predictive Cost-Based Scheduling (PCS) for scalable video streaming. PCS schedules the waiting requests based on their required delivery costs, predicts future system state, and uses the prediction results to possibly alter the scheduling decisions. We also present two alternative implementations of PCS and analyze its waiting-time predictability. The simulation results show that PCS can achieve significant performance improvements and can provide users with highly accurate expected waiting times.