Anticipatory Buffer Control and Resource Allocation for Wireless Video Streaming

Abstract: This paper describes a new approach for allocating resources to video streaming traffic. Assuming that the future channel state can be predicted for a certain time, we minimize the fraction of the bandwidth consumed for smooth streaming by jointly allocating wireless channel resources and play-out buffer size. To formalize this idea, we introduce a new model to capture the dynamic of a video streaming buffer and the allocated spectrum in an optimization problem. The result is a Linear Program that allows to trade off buffer size and allocated bandwidth. Based on this tractable model, our simulation results show that anticipating poor channel states and pre-loading the buffer accordingly allows to serve more users at perfect video quality.