A Control-Theoretic Approach to Adaptive Video Streaming in Dense Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a control-theoretic method using PID controllers to optimize wireless transmission scheduling and video quality adaptation, enhancing QoE in dense wireless networks with many users.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control-theoretic framework that jointly manages transmission scheduling and video adaptation for scalable, high-quality streaming in dense wireless environments.

Findings

Efficiently utilizes wireless resources in dense networks.

Achieves high QoE for a large number of users.

Demonstrates robustness and simplicity of the control approach.

Abstract

Recently, the way people consume video content has been undergoing a dramatic change. Plain TV sets, that have been the center of home entertainment for a long time, are losing grounds to Hybrid TV's, PC's, game consoles, and, more recently, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones. The new predominant paradigm is: watch what I want, when I want, and where I want. The challenges of this shift are manifold. On the one hand, broadcast technologies such as DVB-T/C/S need to be extended or replaced by mechanisms supporting asynchronous viewing, such as IPTV and video streaming over best-effort networks, while remaining scalable to millions of users. On the other hand, the dramatic increase of wireless data traffic begins to stretch the capabilities of the existing wireless infrastructure to its limits. Finally, there is a challenge to video streaming technologies to cope with a high heterogeneity of end-user devices and dynamically changing network conditions, in particular in wireless and mobile networks. In the present work, our goal is to design an efficient system that supports a high number of unicast streaming sessions in a dense wireless access network. We address this goal by jointly considering the two problems of wireless transmission scheduling and video quality adaptation, using techniques inspired by the robustness and simplicity of Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. We show that the control-theoretic approach allows to efficiently utilize available wireless resources, providing high Quality of Experience (QoE) to a large number of users.