A Channel-Aware and Occupancy-Dependent Scheduler for Video Transmission over Wireless Channels

Abstract

In this paper, we propose an adaptive and fair priority scheduler for video streaming over wireless links. The proposed scheme selects the client to be served based on the instantaneous occupancy of the decoder buffers of the wireless clients as well as the quality of the channel as seen by these clients in addition to the sensitivity of scheduled video frames. Unlike conventional scheduling algorithms, the proposed scheme accounts for the characteristics and strict requirements of multimedia applications with considerably low computational complexity. When compared to other commonly-used scheduling algorithms, the proposed algorithm achieves better performance in terms of the individual and average buffer occupancies of the decoder buffers of the wireless clients as well as the end-to-end delay experienced by the video frames. Simulations are carried out to study the interactions among the key parameters of the proposed scheduling algorithm.