Cross-layer optimization for streaming scalable video over fading wireless networks

We present a cross-layer design of transmitting scalable video streams from a base station to multiple clients over a shared fading wireless network by jointly considering the application layer information and the wireless channel conditions. We first design a long-term resource allocation algorithm that determines the optimal wireless scheduling policy in order to maximize the weighted sum of average video quality of all streams. We prove that our algorithm achieves the global optimum even though the problem is not concave in the parameter space. We then devise two on-line scheduling algorithms that utilize the results obtained by the long-term resource allocation algorithm for user and packet scheduling as well as video frame dropping strategy. We compare our schemes with existing video scheduling and buffer management schemes in the literature and simulation results show our proposed schemes significantly outperform existing ones.