We study the design of media streaming applications in the presence of
multiple heterogeneous wireless access methods with different throughputs and
costs. Our objective is to analytically characterize the trade-off between the
usage cost and the Quality of user Experience (QoE), which is represented by
the probability of interruption in media playback and the initial waiting time.
We model each access network as a server that provides packets to the user
according to a Poisson process with a certain rate and cost. Blocks are coded
using random linear codes to alleviate the duplicate packet reception problem.
Users must take decisions on how many packets to buffer before playout, and
which networks to access during playout. We design, analyze and compare several
control policies with a threshold structure. We formulate the problem of
finding the optimal control policy as an MDP with a probabilistic constraint.
We present the HJB equation for this problem by expanding the state space, and
exploit it as a verification method for optimality of the proposed control law.Comment: submitted to CDC 201
