Delivering High-Frame-Rate Video to Mobile Devices in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

High-frame rate (HFR) video streaming is emerging as a new paradigm in popular multimedia applications (e.g., mobile cloud gaming) to achieve smooth viewing experience perceived by end users. However, it is severely challenging to guarantee the delivery quality of HFR video over wireless platforms with regard to the high transmission rate and limited network resources. Multihoming capability enables mobile devices to concurrently receive video data with different radio interfaces (e.g., cellular and Wi-Fi). To effectively deliver mobile HFR video over multiple wireless access networks, this paper develops an application-layer transmission scheme dubbed joint FRAme Scheduling and Error Resilience (FRASER). First, we propose an unequal frame scheduling approach by taking advantage of interlaced forward error correction coding and reliability-aware data allocation to minimize the total distortion. Second, we introduce an error resilience scheme at the receiver side to proactively leverage the out-of-order and overdue video packets to mitigate the error propagations. The proposed FRASER is able to substantially reduce the probability of I (Intra) frame loss and consecutive P (Predicted) frame drops. We conduct the performance evaluation through extensive emulations in Exata involving HFR video streaming encoded with H.264 codec. Evaluation results show that FRASER outperforms the reference transmission schemes in terms of video peak signal-to-noise ratio, end-to-end delay, and received frame rate. Thus, FRASER is recommended for delivering HFR video streaming to multihomed mobile devices in heterogeneous wireless networks.