Delay-Constrained Video Transmission: Quality-Driven Resource Allocation and Scheduling

Real-time video demands quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees such as delay bounds for end-user satisfaction. Furthermore, the tolerable delay varies depending on the use case such as live streaming or two-way video conferencing. Due to the inherently stochastic nature of wireless fading channels, deterministic delay bounds are difficult to guarantee. Instead, we propose providing statistical delay guarantees using the concept of effective capacity. We consider a multiuser setup whereby different users have (possibly different) delay QoS constraints. We derive the resource allocation policy that maximizes the sum video quality and applies to any quality metric with concave rate-quality mapping. We show that the optimal operating point per user is such that the rate-distortion slope is the inverse of the supported video source rate per unit bandwidth, a key metric we refer to as the source spectral efficiency. We extend the resource allocation policy to capture video quality-driven adaptive user-subcarrier assignment in wideband channels as well as capture the impact of adaptive modulation and coding. We also solve the alternative problem of fairness-based resource allocation whereby the objective is to maximize the minimum video quality across users. Finally, we derive user admission and scheduling policies that enable selecting a maximal user subset such that all selected users can meet their statistical delay requirement. Results show that video users with differentiated QoS requirements can achieve similar video quality with vastly different resource requirements. Thus, QoS-aware scheduling and resource allocation enable supporting significantly more users under the same resource constraints.