Capacity and Scheduling of Access Points for Multiple Live Video Streams

This paper studies the problem of serving multiple live video streams to several different clients from a single access point over unreliable wireless links, which is expected to be major a consumer of future wireless capacity. This problem involves two characteristics. On the streaming side, different video streams may generate variable-bit-rate traffic with different traffic patterns. On the network side, the wireless transmissions are unreliable, and the link qualities differ from client to client. In order to alleviate the above stochastic aspects of both video streams and link unreliability, each client typically buffers incoming packets before playing the video. The quality of the video playback subscribed to by each flow depends, among other factors, on both the delay of packets as well as their throughput. In this paper we characterize precisely the capacity of the wireless video server in terms of what combination of joint per-packet-delays and throughputs can be supported for the set of flows, as a function of the buffering delay introduced at the server. We also address how to schedule packets at the access point to satisfy the joint per-packet-delay-throughput performance measure. We test the designed policy on the traces of three movies. From our tests, it appears to outperform other policies by a large margin.