On-road video delivery with integrated heterogeneous wireless networks

We consider on-road video delivery using heterogeneous wireless networks, e.g., usagelimited 3G (or 4G) cellular networks and coverage-limited Wi-Fl networks consisting of scattered road-side Access Points (APs), in order to improve mobile user (passenger) experience of such video services. We address the following three fundamental, non-trivial issues and associated challenges: (1) how to dynamically allocate Wi-Fi bandwidth within each AP's coverage; (2) how to dynamically allocate cellular bandwidth subject to data usage limits; and (3) how to jointly optimize the solutions to the former two issues. In particular, we focus on a new optimization problem called On-road Video Delivery (OVD) with integrated heterogeneous networks. Our whole objective is to maximize the systemwide User Experience Index (UEI), which is a performance metric used to evaluate the user experience of such on-road video services. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first that focuses on on-road video delivery with both cellular and Wi-Fi networks. We prove OVD to be NP-Complete and propose two efficient solutions to deal with the above issues. We also design an online version of one proposed algorithm by considering the dynamic arrival of users. The numerical results from large-scale simulations are also presented to evaluate their effectiveness. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.