Control of Multiple Remote Servers for Quality-Fair Delivery of Multimedia Contents

This paper proposes a control scheme for the quality-fair delivery of several encoded video streams to mobile users sharing a common wireless resource. Video quality fairness, as well as similar delivery delays are targeted among streams. The proposed controller is implemented within some aggregator located near the bottleneck of the network. The transmission rate among streams is adapted based on the quality of the already encoded and buffered packets in the aggregator. Encoding rate targets are evaluated by the aggregator and fed back to each remote video server (fully centralized solution), or directly evaluated by each server in a distributed way (partially distributed solution). Each encoding rate target is adjusted for each stream independently based on the corresponding buffer level or buffering delay in the aggregator. Communication delays between the servers and the aggregator are taken into account. The transmission and encoding rate control problems are studied with a control-theoretic perspective. The system is described with a multi-input multi-output model. Proportional Integral (PI) controllers are used to adjust the video quality and control the aggregator buffer levels. The system equilibrium and stability properties are studied. This provides guidelines for choosing the parameters of the PI controllers. Experimental results show the convergence of the proposed control system and demonstrate the improvement in video quality fairness compared to a classical transmission rate fair streaming solution and to a utility max-min fair approach.