Distortion and Cost Controlled Video Streaming in a Heterogeneous Wireless Network Environment

With advances in variant wireless technologies, many mobile devices equipped with multiple interfaces have emerged. In such a multiple wireless network environment, it is desirable to enjoy streaming video with good quality and low cost. The challenge of providing such services is to take advantage of heterogeneous wireless network characteristics, including their bandwidth, packet lost probability and transmission cost. In this paper, we first present a detailed video distortion model to estimate the distortion experienced by service users. Based on this model, we then propose a 3-stage greedy algorithm, which determines the transmission sequences over two heterogeneous wireless networks, so that distortion controlled streaming video services can be provided with near-optimal cost. Experiment results show that the detailed video distortion model can keep the expected distortion under better control. Besides, the proposed 3-stage greedy algorithm provides a solution which meets the distortion and deadline constraints with the near-optimal cost