On the differentiated QoE enforcement between competing scalable video flows over wireless networks

Abstract

In differentiated quality‐of‐experience enforcement (QoE) for video transmission over wireless networks, accurate video quality metrics play a crucial role in the designing process of optimal resource assignment algorithms. Many cross‐layer optimization‐based rate‐allocation strategies, which consider different objective functions (congestion level, total packet loss, etc.), have been developed for this purpose. The main contributions of the proposed work are twofold. Firstly, an optimal resource assignment framework is being developed in which, based on some network‐specific constraints and by incorporating appropriate video quality metrics, the total weighted QoE of some competing scalable video sources is being optimized based on cross‐layer optimization techniques. Secondly, these optimal rates can be used for differentiated QoE enforcement between multiple competing scalable video sources. The resulting optimal rates can be considered as rate feedbacks for online rate adaptation of a moderate scalable video encoder such as H.264/MPEG‐4 advanced video coding. The aforementioned weight parameters are selected based on the importance of each video sequence's quality and can be associated with some previous service level agreement‐based prices. Some numerical analysis have been presented to validate the theoretical results and to verify the claims. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.