MESA: Farsighted flow management for video delivery in broadband wireless networks

Video traffic over cellular and broadband wireless access networks has been rapidly increasing in the recent years. To ameliorate the effect of this increase at wireless bottleneck links, we design and implement the first farsighted flow management framework, called MESA. During periods of network overload, MESA attempts to maximize the long-term quality of experience for each user. MESA has three key differentiating features: (1) It enables joint soft admission control and scheduling across video flows, (2) it takes into account a long-term dissatisfaction metric in making admission control and scheduling decisions, which results in a uniform quality of experience to users, and (3) it builds on the resource virtualization paradigm to enable extensibility in response to future trends and innovations. We implement a prototype system of MESA and evaluate it in detail on a WiMAX network testbed using both static and mobile client scenarios.