Joint rate control and scheduling for wireless uplink video streaming

We solve the problem of uplink video streaming in CDMA cellular networks by jointly designing the rate control and scheduling algorithms. In the pricing-based distributed rate control algorithm, the base station announces a price for the per unit average rate it can support, and the mobile devices choose their desired average transmission rates by balancing their video quality and cost of transmission. Each mobile device then determines the specific video frames to transmit by a video summarization process. In the time-division-multiplexing (TDM) scheduling algorithm, the base station collects the information on frames to be transmitted from all devices within the current time window, sorts them in increasing order of deadlines, and schedules the transmissions in a TDM fashion. This joint algorithm takes advantage of the multi-user content diversity, and maximizes the network total utility (i.e., minimize the network total distortion), while satisfying the delivery deadline constraints. Simulations showed that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the constant rate provision algorithm.