PRIoritized Multimedia Adaptation Scheme over Two-Hop Heterogeneous Wireless Networks (PRiMA)

Live multimedia streaming is one of the greatest promises of a wireless network operator. In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the feedback-oriented multimedia streaming in the wireless domain, in both industry and academia. However, the lack of an acceptable and guaranteed quality of service (QoS) in the wireless domain results in the media packets experiencing dynamic variations in bandwidth, delays and loss rate as they traverse from the sender to the receiver. Moreover, the plethora of wireless devices in the market ranging from i-phone and PDA to laptop, HDTV etc. makes it difficult to provide optimum video quality of the same multimedia content to all the devices simultaneously. In this work, a WiMAX-based two-hop cellular network is considered for multimedia transmission across different hand-held wireless devices. A feedback- based prioritized multimedia adaptive scheme (PRiMA) is proposed for two-hop heterogeneous wireless networks, which ensures that different clients receive the same video with different perceived quality (satisfactory, good and excellent); depending on: (a) the action content in the video, (b) the end-user's choice of service, and importantly, (c) the user's device characteristics. The base station (as the web server) communicates with the end-users through the relay nodes which act as proxy servers. It has been observed that such a prioritization not only results in a higher average perceived quality of the network but also provides a higher perceived quality to majority of the end-users, as compared to the case when there is no prioritization.