Optimizing the delivery of Multimedia over mobile networks

Abstract

The consumption of multimedia content is moving from a residential environment to mobile phones. Mobile data traffic, driven mostly by video demand, is increasing rapidly and wireless spectrum is becoming a more and more scarce resource. This makes it highly important to operate mobile networks efficiently. To tackle this, recent developments in anticipatory networking schemes make it possible to predict the future capacity of mobile devices and optimize the allocation of the limited wireless resources. Further, optimizing Quality of Experience—smooth, quick, and high quality playback—is more difficult in the mobile setting, due to the highly dynamic nature of wireless links. A key requirement for achieving, both anticipatory networking schemes and QoE optimization, is estimating the available bandwidth of mobile devices. Ideally, this should be done quickly and with low overhead.

In summary, we propose a series of improvements to the delivery of multimedia over mobile networks. Our contributions include identifying inefficiencies in the interconnection of mobile operators with the servers hosting content, proposing an algorithm to opportunistically create frequent capacity estimations suitable for use in resource optimization solutions and proposing another algorithm able to estimate the bandwidth class of a device based on minimal traffic in order to identify the ideal streaming quality its connection may support before commencing playback.