vStream IT: Video Streaming for Resource Constrained IoTs - An Optimal Control Approach

In the smart industrial era, with the rise of AR/VR technologies, dense deployments of IoTs such as ‘head mounted displays’ and ‘smart glasses’ are expected to become pervasive. For such dense IoT client deployments, edge-server based video streaming framework can improve the network performance such as low latency, and high and stable throughput. Such network enhancements can be utilized to improve the performance of end-to-end video (application) streaming by appropriately designing Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) algorithm that also takes into account the resource constrained nature of the hosting IoTs. In this paper, we develop one such IoT friendly deterministic optimal control based ABR streaming algorithm. The exponential complexity of underlying state space is tackled by exploiting the underlying problem structure to yield an optimal and computationally-simple ABR algorithm namely, Video Streaming for IoTs (vStreamIT), which also use minimal storage. The efficacy of the proposed vStreamIT algorithm is evaluated against the state of the art and is shown to exhibit improved streaming performance in terms of bit-rate, while consuming less buffer space (a critical storage constraint for IoTs).