Rate Adaptation and Block Scheduling for Delay-sensitive Multimedia Applications

Abstract

Emerging multimedia applications like VR, AR, etc., exhibit unique transmission features, such as block-based transmission, dynamic prioritization for different contents, and deadline-aware delivery, which should be carefully managed but fail to be considered in the design of existing transmission control algorithms. In this work, we propose a delay-sensitive congestion control algorithm with a hybrid of coarse-grained and fine-grained control to improve the QoE scores. The coarse-grained control scheme maintains a low queuing delay and avoids missing the deadline in the steady state. The fine-grained control scheme rapidly reacts to the network dynamics based on our bandwidth estimation model. For the block scheduling, we heuristically model the realistic priority of each block by examining the trade-off among the remaining time, the remaining size, and the priority score of each block. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our solution, which show that our solution significantly outperforms other baseline algorithms.