Energy and Content Aware Multi-Homing Video Transmission in Heterogeneous Networks

This paper studies video transmission using a multi-homing service in a heterogeneous wireless access medium. We propose an energy and content aware video transmission framework that incorporates the energy limitation of mobile terminals (MTs) and the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of video streaming applications, and employs the available opportunities in a heterogeneous wireless access medium. In the proposed framework, the MT determines the transmission power for the utilized radio interfaces, selectively drops some packets under the battery energy limitation, and assigns the most valuable packets to different radio interfaces in order to minimize the video quality distortion. First, the problem is formulated as MINLP which is known to be NP-hard. Then we employ a piecewise linearization approach and solve the problem using a cutting plane method which reduces the associated complexity from MINLP to a series of MIPs. Finally, for practical implementation in MTs, we approximate the video transmission framework using a two-stage optimization problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed framework exhibits very close performance to the exact problem solution. In addition, the proposed framework, unlike the existing solutions in literature, offers a choice for desirable trade-off between the achieved video quality and the MT operational period per battery charging.