Interference Shaping for Improved Quality of Experience for Real-Time Video Streaming

Abstract

The unpredictability of the wireless medium poses a major challenge to delivering a high quality of experience (QoE) for real-time video services. Bursty co-channel interference is a prominent cause of wireless throughput variability, which leads to video QoE degradation, even for a fixed average channel quality. In this paper, we propose and analyze a network-level resource management algorithm termed interference shaping to smooth out the throughput variations (and hence improve the QoE) of video users by decreasing the peak rate of co-channel best effort users. Wireless link capacity variations are mapped to the real-time video packet loss rate, and the interference shaping QoE gain for video users is quantified by benchmarking against a modified multi-scale structural similarity (H-MS-SSIM) index. H-MS-SSIM is an accurate perceptual video quality metric that incorporates the important hysteresis effect whereby the current QoE (which is subjective) may strongly depend on the recent past. The proposed technique increases mean QoE and reduces the QoE variability over time, with a net perceptual increase of about 2-3x in illustrative settings while incurring insignificant decrease in the QoE for co-channel best effort users. Interference shaping can be implemented in both unicast and multicast real-time video streaming with much higher potential gains for multicast.