Proxy-based transmission strategies for wireless video streaming

We present proxy-based transmission strategies for improving the quality of delay-critical video streams which are transmitted in parallel on the downlink of a cellular system. Compared to state-of-the-art radio link buffer management, our solution allows to shape the rate of the incoming video streams in a rate-distortion optimized way before congestion may occur. Furthermore, joint optimization across multiple parallel streams is possible to avoid blocking of certain users by less important data units of others. The proposed solution only requires periodic reporting of abstract side information from the radio link layer in terms of the current buffer status and the average throughput. We demonstrate the improved perceptual quality and fairness that can be achieved with our solution for a simple downlink scenario.