Joint Buffer Management and Scheduling for Wireless Video Streaming

In this paper we revisit strategies for joint radio link buffer management and scheduling for wireless video streaming. Based on previous work [1], we search for an optimal combination of scheduler and drop strategy for different end–to–end streaming options. We will show that a performance gain vs. the two best drop strategies in [1], ie drop the HOL packet or drop the lowest priority packet starting from HOL, is possible: Provided that basic side-information on the video stream structure is available, a more sophisticated strategy removes packets from an HOL group of packets such that the temporal dependencies usually present in video streams are not violated. This advanced buffer management scheme yields significant improvements for almost all investigated scheduling algorithms and streaming options. In addition, we will demonstrate the importance of fairness among users when selecting a suitable scheduler.