Rate-control and multi-channel scheduling for wireless live streaming with stringent deadlines

SVC-based live video-streaming in multi-channel wireless networks leads to a challenging joint rate-control and scheduling problem with stringent deadline constraints. Traditional utility-based approaches often did not explicitly account for deadlines. In this paper, we explicitly account for deadlines and study the problem of optimizing the total reward from packets meeting their deadlines in a modern 4G OFDM system. Motivated by a heuristic utility-based approach, we propose a class of threshold-based rate-control and wireless scheduling policies that can respect the deadline constraints and approach the optimal system reward asymptotically as the system size increases. We also propose a distributed realization of our threshold-based policies that can be easily implemented in practical scenarios. We substantiate the result via both analysis and simulation.