Channel aware rebuffering for wireless media streaming with handoff control

Packet/frame ‘rebuffering’ in wireless video streaming typically considers only connectivity from the mobile terminal to its network access point (AP). However, in the presence of multiple APs with the possibility of handoffs, the overall wireless environment should be considered. We develop a model capturing joint rebuffering & handoff dynamics in wireless video streaming, and design a new channel-aware joint rebuffering & handoff control scheme, aiming to minimize the long-run average cost of video jitters and freezes. We first characterize the optimal control in the general case of multiple wireless APs/channels and multiple states per channel. Subsequently, we evaluate the system performance in key important cases, using experimental traces of wireless channel data. We explore the relationship between optimal rebuffering thresholds and overall channel dynamics, and evaluate the associated joint handoff control. The performance results demonstrate the importance of jointly managing rebuffering and handoff controls to achieve high-performance wireless video streaming.