Distortion-minimizing network-aware scheduling for UMTS video streaming

In this paper we propose a mechanism for scheduling video streaming data of a single user over a UMTS dedicated channel. The proposed method makes use of link error prediction and schedules the more important data in the time intervals with lowest predicted error probability. The importance of the information is measured by means of the distortion that would be caused by its loss. The distortion is estimated by a novel proposed model based on the size of the lost information in bits and in picture blocks. The presented scheduling improves the PSNR at the decoder by up to 2dB while preserving rate.