Delay-Constrained High Definition Video Transmission In Heterogeneous Wireless Networks With Multi-Homed Terminals

Delivering high-quality mobile video with the limited radio resources is challenging due to the time-varying channel status and stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Multi-homing support enables mobile terminals to establish multiple simultaneous associations for enhancing transmission performance. In this paper, we study the multi-homed communication of delay-constrained High Definition (HD) video in heterogeneous wireless networks. The low-delay encoded HD video streaming consists exclusively of Intra (I) and Predicted (P) frames. In the capacity-limited wireless networks, it is highly possible the large-size I frames experience deadline violations and induce severe quality degradations. To address the challenging problem, we propose a novel scheduling framework dubbed delAy Stringent COded Transmission (ASCOT) that featured by frame-level data protection and allocation over multiple wireless access networks. First, we perform online video distortion estimation to simulate multi-homed transmission impairments according to the feedback channel status and input video data. Second, we control the frame protection level by adapting the Forward Error Correction (FEC) coding redundancy and video data allocation to achieve target quality. The performance of the proposed ASCOT is evaluated through semi-physical emulations in Exata using real-time H.264 video streaming. Experimental results show that ASCOT outperforms existing transmission schemes in improving the video PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), reducing the end-to-end delay, and increasing the goodput. Or conversely, ASCOT achieves the same video quality with approximately 20 percent bandwidth conservation.