Multimedia streaming over mobile networks: Exploring the quality gain potentials of P2P coordinative multisource selection

The availability of multiple data sources provides extra potential to improve wireless multimedia service quality. However, the exploration of such multisource selection has largely been ignored in literature. In this chapter we present a new solution to optimize the receiver-side multimedia quality by coordinating the transmission of multiple media sources, using a lossy wireless peer-to-peer (P2P) network an an example scenario, while assuring the latency constraint. The major advantages of the coordinative multisource selection solution are twofold. First, it distributes workload to each media source by optimal grouping of multimedia frames on each peer host. Second, optimal channel coding rates are allocated to multimedia frames transmitted on each path. To reduce the computing complexity, the global optimal solution for all the multimedia frames is divided into multiple local optimal solutions. Specifically, (1) we divide all transmission paths into two groups in light of related bit error rates and path-pass probability, and allocate the same channel coding rate to each group, and we (2) find the optimal data source for each multimedia frame according to the value of effective transmission capacity (ETC). The simulation results show that the simplified strategy works as good as the global optimal solution, and it significantly improves the end-received multimedia quality under different latency constraints. This work casts new insights to future wireless multimedia streaming solution provision, by exploring the potential of coordinative multisource selection.