Quality-Aware Streaming and Scheduling for Device-to-Device Video Delivery

On-demand video streaming is becoming a killer application for wireless networks. Recent information-theoretic results have shown that a combination of caching on the users' devices and device-to-device (D2D) communications yields throughput scalability for very dense networks, which represent critical bottlenecks for conventional cellular and wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies. In this paper, we consider the implementation of such caching D2D systems where each device pre-caches a subset of video files from a library, and users requesting a file that is not already in their library obtain it from neighboring devices through D2D communication. We develop centralized and distributed algorithms for the delivery phase, encompassing a link scheduling and a streaming component. The centralized scheduling is based on the max-weighted independent set (MWIS) principle and uses message-passing to determine max-weight independent sets. The distributed scheduling is based on a variant of the FlashLinQ link scheduling algorithm, enhanced by introducing video-streaming specific weights. In both cases, the streaming component is based on a quality-aware stochastic optimization approach, reminiscent of current Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) technology, for which users sequentially request video “chunks” by choosing adaptively their quality level. The streaming and the scheduling components are coupled by the length of the users' request queues. Through extensive system simulation, the proposed approaches are shown to provide sizeable gains with respect to baseline schemes formed by the concatenation of off-the-shelf FlashLinQ with proportional fair link scheduling and DASH at the application layer.