A Mobile-aware Adaptive Rate Control Scheme for Improving the User Perceived QoS of Multimedia Streaming Services in Wireless Broadband Networks

Abstract

Recently, due to the prevalence of various mobile devices and wireless broadband networks, there has been a significant increase in interest and demand for multimedia streaming services such as the mobile IPTV. In such a wireless broadband network, transmitting a continuous stream of multimedia data is difficult to achieve due to mobile stations (MSs) movement. Providing Quality of Service (QoS) for multimedia video streaming applications requires the server and/or client to be network-aware and adaptive. Therefore, in order to deploy a mobile IPTV service in wireless broadband networks, offering users efficient wireless resource utilization and seamlessly offering user perceived QoS are important issues. In this paper, we propose a new adaptive streaming scheme, called MARC (Mobile-aware Adaptive Rate Control), which adjusts the quality of bit-stream and transmission rate of video streaming based on the wireless channel status and network status. The proposed scheme can control the rate of multimedia streaming to be suitable for the wireless channel status by using awareness information of the wireless channel quality and the mobile station location. The proposed scheme can provide a seamless multimedia playback service in wireless broadband networks in addition to improving the QoS of multimedia streaming services. The proposed MARC scheme alleviates the discontinuity of multimedia playback and allocates a suitable client buffer to the wireless broadband network. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.