Joint Rate Control and Scheduling for Wireless Uplink Video Streaming

We solve the problem of uplink video streaming in CDMA cellular networks by jointly design the rate control and scheduling algorithms. In the pricing-based distributed rate control algorithm, the base station announces a price for the per unit average rate it can support, and the mobile devices choose their desired average transmission rates by balancing their video quality and cost of transmission. Each mobile device then determines the specific video frames to transmit by a video summarization process. In the scheduling algorithm, we show that a time-division-multiplexing (TDM) based algorithm provides higher rates and lower distortions than the code-division-multiplexing (CDM) based transmission schemes currently deployed for voice and generic data traffic. In the TDM-based algorithm, the base station collects the information of frames to be transmitted from all devices within the current time window, sort them in the increasing order of deadlines, and schedule the transmissions in a TDM fashion. This joint algorithm takes advantage of the multi-user content diversity of the mobile devices, and maximize the network total utility (i.e., minimize the network total distortion), while satisfying all the delivery deadline constraints. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the constant rate provision algorithm in terms of minimizing users’ distortions.