Delay-Aware Rate Control for Multi-User Scalable Video Streaming Over Mobile Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose a delay and capacity constrained multi-user scalable video streaming scheme that improves the average end-to-end distortion of transmitted video streams compared to traditional streaming strategies. Wireless video streaming applications are characterized by their bandwidth-intensity, delay-sensitivity, and loss-tolerance. Our main contributions include: (i) an analytical expression for packet delay and play-out deadline of unequal erasure protection (UXP) protected scalable video, (ii) an analysis of the performance of delay-aware, capacity-aware rate allocation for optimized UXP streaming scenarios, (iii) proof that unequal error protection causes a rate-constrained optimization problem to be non-convex. Performance evaluations using a 3GPP network simulator show that, for different channel capacities and packet loss rates, delay- aware non-stationary rate-allocation delivers significant gains which range between 1.65 dB to 2 dB in average Y-PSNR of the received video streams over delay-unaware strategies. These gains come at a cost of increased off-line computation which is performed prior to the streaming session and therefore, do not affect the run-time performance of the streaming system. .