Long-term rate control for concurrent multipath real-time video transmission in heterogeneous wireless networks.

Concurrent multipath transmission provides an effective solution for streaming high-quality mobile videos in heterogeneous wireless networks. Rate control is commonly adopted in multimedia communication systems to fully utilize the available network bandwidth. This paper proposes a novel rate control for concurrent multipath video transmission. The existing rate control algorithms mainly adapt bit rate in the short-term pattern, i.e., without considering the long-term video transmission quality. We propose a long-term rate control scheme that takes into account the status of both the transmission buffer and video frames. First, a mathematical model is developed to formulate the non-convex problem of long-term quality maximization. Second, we develop a dynamic programming solution for online encoding bit rate control based on buffer status. The performance evaluation is conducted in a real test bed over LTE and Wi-Fi networks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed long-term rate control scheme achieves appreciable improvements over the short-term rate control schemes in terms of video quality and delay performance.