Lyapunov Optimized Resource Management for Multiuser Mobile Video Streaming

Buffering techniques have been commonly used in mobile video streaming systems to handle the bandwidth fluctuation and to mitigate the impact of the stochastic characteristic of wireless channels on a mobile user's quality of experience. However, it has been shown by measurement study that users tend to abort when watching videos with mobile devices, which results in a significant wastage of the video data in the buffer. Therefore, one important problem in mobile video streaming is how to manage the buffer at each mobile user. On the other hand, mobile users generally share the wireless media to download the video data, i.e., mobile users compete with each other for the bandwidth to download the video data. Thus, another important problem in mobile video streaming is how to allocate bandwidth among mobile users. In this paper, we propose to optimize the resource management, i.e., to design buffer management strategy at each mobile user and bandwidth allocation strategy among mobile users, for the multiuser mobile video streaming systems. Specifically, we optimize the long-term average total cost of data wastage and quality of experience of mobile users with certain constraints. By introducing virtual queues and employing the Lyapunov optimization theory, we transform the original optimization problem into the drift-plus-penalty minimization problem. Then, we adopt the primal decomposition to decouple the relationship among different mobile users, which decomposes the problem into a master problem with multiple subproblems. A one-dimension full search algorithm is applied to find the global optimal solution to each subproblem, and the subgradient descent algorithm is utilized to update the solution to the master problem. Finally, simulations are conducted to show that the proposed algorithm is effective for the buffer management and bandwidth allocation in a multiuser mobile video streaming system.