Massive live video distribution using hybrid cellular and ad hoc networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of disseminating multiple live videos to mobile users by using a hybrid cellular and ad hoc network. Specifically, we develop techniques to optimize the overall quality of video delivery by: (a) exploiting the flexibility of layered videos for in-network adaptation to reduce the gap between video coding rate and network capacity, and (b) alleviating the load of individually handling a large number of flows at the cell tower by using deviceto-device ad hoc connectivity to deliver videos. We study the problem of optimally choosing the mobile devices that will serve as gateways from the cellular to the ad hoc network, the ad hoc routes from the gateway to individual devices, and the layers to deliver on these ad hoc routes. We develop a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) based solution to the considered problem. We also develop a heuristic algorithm to select the devices, routes, and layers more efficiently than the ideal, but potentially time-consuming MILP-based algorithm. We evaluate the proposed techniques via through simulations. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the current solution in terms of overall video quality, transmission latency, delivery ratio, and missed frame ratio. For example, compared to the current cellular network, the MILP-based and the heuristic algorithms result in up to 20 dB higher video quality. Furthermore, the heuristic algorithm runs efficiently yet achieves near-optimal quality: at most 2.3 dB gap across all experiments.

HybCAST: Rich Content Dissemination in Hybrid Cellular and 802.11 Ad Hoc Networks

“…Problems addressed by unicast based solutions include effective proxy selection [19], [18], optimal live video streaming [10], and video ads dissemination [13]. In [19], [18], a requesting device which wishes to download data from a base station looks for a proxy which is a device with highest cellular data around it and establish a path from the proxy to itself.…”

“…Data is unicast from base station to the found proxy and then pushed to the requesting device along the found route. Do et al [10] proposed scheduling algorithms to optimize live video streaming from a server to a set of devices. Videos are encoded into layers using a novel coding standard H.264/SVC to be scalable with the fluctuations of wireless network capacity.…”

Implementation of a protocol for cooperative packet recovery over hybrid networks

“…The literature describes many variations on this theme [2,4,8,10,[14][15][16][17] all of which are found to improve performance in simulations. However, we have not seen any practical implementation which has been tested in a real hybrid wireless network.…”

AmbiStream: A Middleware for Multimedia Streaming on Heterogeneous Mobile Devices

“…Indeed, architectures for multimedia streaming on the Internet such as [10,23] suppose the existence of powerful servers that can adapt content on behalf of clients, which is infeasible when the streaming server is a resource-constrained smartphone. Solutions for multimedia streaming on ad hoc networks either do not consider the problem of content adaptation [2,12,24] or are cross-layered, such as those surveyed in [14]. Crosslayered solutions require cooperation between application layers and networking layers, e.g., integration between the video codec and the routing protocol to optimize streaming quality.…”