eTVSQ based video rate adaptation in cellular networks with α-fair resource allocation

Due to proliferation of mobile devices, the demand for video in cellular networks has increased exorbitantly. However, cellular networks have limited resources and the wireless medium is time-varying in nature. This necessitates the video streaming protocols to be re-designed taking into account the overall quality of experience (QoE) of the end users. In this paper, we propose a metric called enhanced-time varying subjective quality (eTVSQ) to measure the QoE of the video users. The eTVSQ accounts for time variation in QoE due to both rate adaption in HTTP streaming and playback interruption caused by rebuffering events. Based on this metric, we propose a rate adaptation strategy for HTTP video streaming in the downlink of cellular networks with α-fair resource allocation. The proposed method results in significant performance gains over the traditional throughput based rate adaptation strategy