Anticipatory resource allocation for wireless video streaming

This paper describes a new approach for allocating resources to video streaming traffic. Assuming that the future channel state can be predicted for a certain time, we minimize the fraction of the bandwidth consumed for smooth streaming by allocating wireless channel resources with respect to a constraint on the user's video play-out buffer. To formalize this idea, we introduce a new model to capture the dynamic of the play-out buffer and the allocated spectrum in an optimization problem. The result is a Linear Program that allows to trade off buffer size and allocated bandwidth. Based on this tractable model, our simulation results show that anticipating poor channel states and pre-loading the buffer accordingly allows to serve a high number of video users at increased spectral efficiency.