A low-latency scheduling approach for high-definition video streaming in a heterogeneous wireless network with multihomed clients

We consider the problem of high-definition (HD) video transmission in a heterogeneous wireless network from a video server to a multihomed client. On the one hand, a single wireless network is limited in the transmission performance (e.g., available bandwidth and link delay); On the other hand, the HD video streaming is characterized by the high transmission rate and large-size video frames. Thus, the end-to-end video frame delay becomes a severely challenging problem which is critical for the real-time video applications. In this paper, we propose a novel scheduling approach named sub-frame-level (SFL), which deliberately splits the large-size video frames into sub-frames and dispatches each of them onto a different wireless network to the multihomed client. This approach is able to improve the frame-level delay for enhancing video quality. We formulate the optimization problem of video streaming allocation for minimizing the end-to-end delay based on the network calculus and derive its solution with the water filling algorithm. We evaluate the performance of the proposed SFL through the Exata emulations using real-time H.264 video streaming. Emulation results show that SFL outperforms the existing frame-level scheduling approaches in improving the frame-level delay as well as in enhancing video quality in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio.