Cross layer techniques for adaptive video streaming over wireless networks

Wireless multimedia delivery is becoming increasingly more important in today's networks. Unlike wired packet switched networks that suffer from congestion related loss and delay, the wireless networks have to deal with a time varying, error prone, physical channel that in many instances is also severely bandwidth constrained. As such, the solutions needed for wireless video streaming applications are fundamentally different from wired streaming. In this paper, we propose a set of end to end application layer techniques for adaptive video streaming over wireless networks. The adaptation is done both with respect to channel and data. Our approach combines the flexibility and programmability of application layer adaptations, with low delay and bandwidth efficiency of link layer techniques. Socket level simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of our approach.