Cross-Modal Stream Scheduling for eHealth

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Cross-modal applications that elaborately integrate audio, video, and haptic streams will become the mainstream of the eHealth systems. However, existing stream schedulers usually fail to simultaneously meet the cross-modal transmission requests in terms of low latency, high reliability, high throughput, and low complexity. To circumvent this dilemma, this article proposes a general cross-modal stream scheduling scheme by fully taking advantage of the characteristics of different modal streams and their underlying temporal, spatial, and semantic relevance. Specifically, we first propose a hierarchical stream category framework, in which the transmission priority of the modal stream instead of the data flow can be flexibly settled. Next, we design a series of modal-aware stream scheduling schemes by jointly making use of the network slice and mobile edge computing to achieve the tradeoff among the various metrics. Importantly, the transmission strategy can be adjusted adaptively to realize the optimal resource allocation. Subsequently, we analyze the relationship among the user experience, multi-modal impact, and stream scheduling through investigating the interacted impacts among the different modal streams, then develop a user experience based scheduling switch strategy to improve the application generality and reduce the performance fluctuation. Numerical objective and subjective results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed cross-modal scheduling scheme.