Latency-Driven Cross-Layer Scheduling for Robust Video Streaming over Cellular Links

For a video stream over under-provisioned cellular links, burst errors may lead to serious video quality degradation. By jointly exploiting the error-resilience scheduling mechanism on different communication layers, this chapter proposes a latency-driven cross-layer scheduling scheme to achieve better error-resilience performance. After the network-layer agent at a generalized base station firstly utilizes the network-layer packet scheduling to provide packet-granularity importance classes for each Latency-Constraint Frame Set (LFS) of the video stream, the link-layer agent at the base station further utilizes the link-layer Radio Link Unit (RLU) scheduling to implement finer selective retransmission for the LFS. At the cost of different latency, the proposed scheme can simply but effectively shift burst errors into lower-priority parts in an LFS. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme has strong robustness against burst errors, and thus improves the overall received quality of the video stream over under-provisioned cellular links.