A content-aware scheduling scheme for video streaming to multiple users over wireless networks

There is a rapidly growing interest in high speed data transmission over digital cellular networks. This interest is fueled mainly by the need to provide multimedia content to mobile users. In this paper, we present a packet scheduling scheme that can be used for real-time streaming of pre-encoded video over downlink packet access wireless networks. We consider a gradient-based scheduling scheme in which user data rates are dynamically adjusted based on their channel quality as well as the gradients of a utility function. The utility functions are designed by taking into account the distortion of the received video. They allow for content-aware packet scheduling both within and across multiple users. Simulation results show that the gradient-based scheduling framework, when combined with the distortion-aware utility functions, significantly outperforms conventional content-independent packet scheduling schemes.