Scalability of Multimedia Streaming Service: A Cross-Layer Perspective

Video streaming is in advance popularity among mobile users. The latest mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, are well equipped with multiple wireless network devices. In order to continue video streaming quality while reducing the wireless service cost, in this paper, the most favorable video streaming process with multiple links is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). This function is designed to improve the quality of service (QoS) requirements for video traffic, such as the startup Latency, playback fluency, average playback quality, playback smoothness and wireless service cost. To solve the MDP in real time, we propose an adaptive, best-action search algorithm to obtain a sub-optimal solution. To estimate the performance of the proposed adaptation algorithm, we implemented a test bed using the android mobile phone and the Scaleable Video Coding (SVC) codec. Test results demonstrate the probability and effectiveness of the proposed adaptation algorithm for mobile video streaming applications in android application, which outperforms the existing state-of-the-art adaptation algorithms.