Transmitting important bits and sailing high radio waves: a decentralized cross-layer approach to cooperative video transmission

TL;DR

This paper presents a decentralized cross-layer framework for cooperative wireless video transmission that optimizes resource allocation and cooperation to improve video quality and network efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel MU-MDP-based approach incorporating cooperation decisions, with practical approximations to reduce complexity and enhance performance in wireless video networks.

Findings

Cooperation improves video quality by 5-10 dB PSNR for weak signals.

Resource pricing adapts to network capacity, decreasing in high-rate networks.

Energy consumption remains moderate with cooperative diversity.

Abstract

We investigate the impact of cooperative relaying on uplink and downlink multi-user (MU) wireless video transmissions. The objective is to maximize the long-term sum of utilities across the video terminals in a decentralized fashion, by jointly optimizing the packet scheduling, the resource allocation, and the cooperation decisions, under the assumption that some nodes are willing to act as cooperative relays. A pricing-based distributed resource allocation framework is adopted, where the price reflects the expected future congestion in the network. Specifically, we formulate the wireless video transmission problem as an MU Markov decision process (MDP) that explicitly considers the cooperation at the physical layer and the medium access control sublayer, the video users' heterogeneous traffic characteristics, the dynamically varying network conditions, and the coupling among the users' transmission strategies across time due to the shared wireless resource. Although MDPs notoriously suffer from the curse of dimensionality, our study shows that, with appropriate simplications and approximations, the complexity of the MU-MDP can be significantly mitigated. Our simulation results demonstrate that integrating cooperative decisions into the MU-MDP optimization can increase the resource price in networks that only support low transmission rates and can decrease the price in networks that support high transmission rates. Additionally, our results show that cooperation allows users with feeble direct signals to achieve improvements in video quality on the order of 5-10 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), with less than 0.8 dB quality loss by users with strong direct signals, and with a moderate increase in total network energy consumption that is significantly less than the energy that a distant node would require to achieve an equivalent PSNR without exploiting cooperative diversity.