Mobile video has emerged as a dominant contributor to cellular traffic. It already accounts for around 40-55 percent of all cellular traffic and is forecast to grow by around 55 percent annually through 2021. While its popularity is on the rise, delivering high quality streaming video over cellular networks remains extremely challenging. In particular, the video quality under challenging conditions such as mobility and poor wireless channel qualities is sometimes unacceptably poor. Almost every viewer at some point in time can relate to experiences of choppy videos, stalls, etc. Not surprisingly, a lot of attention from both research and industry in the past decade has focused on the development of adaptive streaming techniques for video on demand that can dynamically adjust the quality of the video being streamed to the changes in network conditions. We formulate video streaming problem constrained to finite buffer and limited bandwidth as a non-convex optimization problem. However, we show that the problem can be optimally solved with a polynomial time algorithm. This key component can be used to give streaming decisions using bandwidth prediction (e.g crowd-sourced learning). Moreover, we also extended our algorithm to multiple paths, collaborative, and multi-cast streaming and show optimality under a few conditions.
Some related publications:
A. Elgabli, K. Liu and V. Aggarwal, "Optimized Preference-Aware Multi-Path Video Streaming with Scalable Video Coding," in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 159-172, 1 Jan. 2020, doi: 10.1109/TMC.2018.2889039.
A. Elgabli, M. Felemban and V. Aggarwal, "GiantClient: Video HotSpot for Multi-User Streaming," in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 29, no. 9, pp. 2833-2843, Sept. 2019, doi: 10.1109/TCSVT.2018.2870715.
A. Elgabli and V. Aggarwal, "SmartStreamer: Preference-Aware Multipath Video Streaming Over MPTCP," in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, vol. 68, no. 7, pp. 6975-6984, July 2019, doi: 10.1109/TVT.2019.2915355.
A. Elgabli, M. Felemban and V. Aggarwal, "GroupCast: Preference-Aware Cooperative Video Streaming With Scalable Video Coding," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 1138-1150, June 2019, doi: 10.1109/TNET.2019.2911523.
A. Elgabli and V. Aggarwal, "FastScan: Robust Low-Complexity Rate Adaptation Algorithm for Video Streaming over HTTP," in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, doi: 10.1109/TCSVT.2019.2914388.
A. Elgabli, V. Aggarwal, S. Hao, F. Qian and S. Sen, "LBP: Robust Rate Adaptation Algorithm for SVC Video Streaming," in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 1633-1645, Aug. 2018, doi: 10.1109/TNET.2018.2844123.