Joint power-playout control for media streaming over wireless links

Media streaming applications over wireless links face various challenges, due to both the nature of the wireless channel and the stringent delivery requirements of media traffic. In this paper, we seek to improve the performance of media streaming over an interference-limited wireless link, by using appropriate transmission and playout control. In particular, we choose both the power at the transmitter and the playout scheduling at the receiver, so as to minimize the power consumption and maximize the media playout quality. We formulate the problem using a dynamic programming approach, and study the structural properties of the optimal solution. We further develop a justified, low-complexity heuristic that achieves significant performance gain over benchmark systems. In particular, our joint power-playout heuristic outperforms: 1) the optimal power control policy in the regime where power is most important and 2) the optimal playout control policy in the regime where media (playout) quality is most important; furthermore, this heuristic has only a slight performance loss as compared to the optimal joint power-playout control policy over the entire range of the investigation

I. Introduction

Recent advances in video compression and streaming, and also in wireless networking technologies (next-generation cellular networks and high-throughput wireless LANs), are rapidly opening up opportunities for media streaming over interference-limited and erratic wireless channels. Supporting high-quality media applications over wireless channels introduces technical challenges at multiple levels, including the important problems of: 1) transmitter power (and/or rate) control and 2) receiver playout rate control. In this paper, we formulate and investigate the joint power/playout control problem for media streaming over wireless, coupling the receiver and transmitter actions to achieve substantial performance gains.