Anticipatory Buffer Control and Resource Allocation for Wireless Video Streaming

TL;DR

This paper proposes a predictive resource allocation method for wireless video streaming that optimizes buffer size and bandwidth to improve quality and serve more users by anticipating channel conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel model and linear programming approach for anticipatory buffer control and resource allocation in wireless video streaming.

Findings

Anticipating poor channel states improves streaming quality.

Pre-loading buffers increases the number of users served.

The model effectively balances buffer size and bandwidth usage.

Abstract

This paper describes a new approach for allocating resources to video streaming traffic. Assuming that the future channel state can be predicted for a certain time, we minimize the fraction of the bandwidth consumed for smooth streaming by jointly allocating wireless channel resources and play-out buffer size. To formalize this idea, we introduce a new model to capture the dynamic of a video streaming buffer and the allocated spectrum in an optimization problem. The result is a Linear Program that allows to trade off buffer size and allocated bandwidth. Based on this tractable model, our simulation results show that anticipating poor channel states and pre-loading the buffer accordingly allows to serve more users at perfect video quality.