Multi User Cooperative Mobile Video Streaming: Performance Analysis and Online Mechanism Design
Adaptive bitrate streaming enables video users to <italic>adapt</italic> their playing bitrates to the real time network conditions, hence achieving the desirable quality of experience (QoE) In a multi user wireless scenario, however, existing single user based bitrate adaptation methods may fail to provide the desirable QoE, due to lack of consideration of multi user interactions (such as the multi user interferences and network congestion) In this work, we propose a novel user cooperation framework based on <italic>user provided networking</italic> for multi user mobile video streaming over wireless cellular networks. The framework enables nearby mobile video users to crowdsource their cellular links and resources for cooperative video streaming. We first analyze the social welfare performance bound of the proposed cooperative streaming system by introducing a virtual time slotted system. Then, we design a low complexity Lyapunov based online algorithm, which can be implemented in an online and distributed manner without the complete future and global network information. Numerical results show that the proposed online algorithm achieves an average 97 percent of the theoretical maximum social welfare. We further conduct experiments with real data traces, to compare our proposed online algorithm with the existing online algorithms in the literature. Experiment results show that our algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of both the achievable bitrate (with an average gain of 20 <inline formula><tex math notation="LaTeX"\sim$/tex math><alternatives><inline graphic xlink:href="huang ieq1 2834358.gif"/alternatives>/inline formula> 30 percent) and social welfare (with an average gain of 10 <inline formula><tex math notation="LaTeX"\sim$/tex math><alternatives><inline graphic xlink:href="huang ieq2 2834358.gif"/alternatives>/inline formula> 50 percent)
IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing