MARC: Adaptive Rate Control scheme for improving the QoE of streaming services in mobile broadband networks

Recently, due to the prevalence of various mobile devices and broadband wireless networks, there has been a significant increase in interest and demand for multimedia streaming services such as the mobile IPTV. In order to deploy a mobile IPTV service in wireless broadband networks, offering users efficient wireless resource utilization and seamlessly offering Quality of Experience (QoE) are important issues. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive streaming scheme, called Mobile-aware Adaptive Rate Control (MARC), which adjusts the quality of bit-stream and transmission rate of video streaming based on the wireless channel status and network status. The proposed scheme can provide a seamless multimedia playback service in wireless broadband networks in addition to improving the quality of service (QoS) of multimedia streaming services. The proposed MARC scheme alleviates the discontinuity of multimedia playback and allocates a suitable client buffer to the wireless broadband network. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.