KEYWORDS: Video, Video surveillance, Standards development, Computer programming, Distortion, Optimization (mathematics), Systems modeling, Control systems, Computer simulations, Video coding
Video streaming over wireless networks is getting very popular because of the high bandwidth and the support of quality
of service offered by recent wireless standards, such as IEEE 802.11e. We consider optimizing the quality of video
streaming in single-hop wireless networks that are composed of multiple wireless stations. Our optimization problem
controls parameters in different layers to optimally allocate the wireless network resources among all stations. We address
this problem in two steps. First, we formulate an abstract optimization problem for video streaming in single-hop wireless
networks in general. This formulation exposes the important interaction between parameters belonging to different layers
in the network stack. Then, we instantiate and solve the general problem for the recent IEEE 802.11e WLANs, which
support prioritized traffic classes. We show how the calculated optimal solutions can efficiently be implemented in the
distributed mode of the IEEE 802.11e standard. We evaluate our proposed solution using extensive simulations in the
OPNET simulator, which captures most features of realistic wireless networks. In addition, to show the practicability of
our solution, we have implemented it in the driver of an off-the-shelf wireless adapter that complies with the IEEE 802.11e
standard. Our experimental and simulation results show that significant quality improvement in video streams can be
achieved using our solution, without incurring any significant communication or computational overhead.
Since mobile devices are battery powered, several mobile TV standards dictate using energy saving schemes to increase
the viewing time on mobile devices. The most common scheme for saving energy is to make the base station broadcast
the video data of a TV channel in bursts with a bit rate much higher than the encoding rate of the video stream, which
enables mobile devices to turn off their radio frequency circuits when not receiving bursts. While broadcasting bursts saves
energy, it increases the channel switching delay. The switching delay is an important performance metric, because long
and variable switching delays are annoying to users and may turn them away from the mobile TV service. In this paper,
we first analyze the burst broadcasting scheme currently used in many deployed mobile TV networks, and we show that it
is not efficient in terms of controlling the channel switching delay. We then propose new schemes to guarantee that a given
maximum switching delay is not exceeded and that the energy consumption of mobile devices is minimized. We prove the
correctness of the proposed schemes and derive closed-form equations for the achieved energy saving. We also implement
the proposed schemes in a mobile TV testbed to show their practicability and to validate our theoretical analysis.
We present optimal schemes for allocating bits of fine-grained scalable video sequences among multiple senders streaming
to a single receiver. This allocation problem is critical in optimizing the perceived quality in peer-to-peer and distributed
multi-server streaming environments. Senders in such environments are heterogeneous in their outgoing bandwidth and
they hold different portions of the video stream. We formulate the allocation problem as an optimization problem, which
is nonlinear in general. We use rate-distortion models in the formulation to achieve the minimum distortion in the rendered
video, constrained by the outgoing bandwidth of senders, availability of video data at senders, and incoming bandwidth of
receiver. We show how the adopted rate-distortion models transform the nonlinear problem to an integer linear programming
(ILP) problem. We then design a simple rounding scheme that transforms the ILP problem to a linear programming
(LP) one, which can be solved efficiently using common optimization techniques such as the Simplex method. We prove
that our rounding scheme always produces a feasible solution, and the solution is within a negligible margin from the
optimal solution. We also propose a new algorithm (FGSAssign) for the allocation problem that runs in O(n log n) steps,
where n is the number of senders. We prove that FGSAssign is optimal. Because of its short running time, FGSAssign can
be used in real time during the streaming session. Our experimental study validates our analytical analysis and shows the
effectiveness of our allocation algorithm in improving the video quality.
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