Collaborative resource management for video over wireless multi-hop mesh networks

In this paper, we consider the problem of real-time multimedia transmission among several peers (users). The peers use a heterogeneous wireless multi-hop mesh network for the delivery of these high-bandwidth streams. One of the main challenges of the considered problem is the division of the scarce wireless resources among the various peers. To address this problem, we propose an efficient, distributed and collaborative framework for wireless resource exchanges that enables peers to divide available wireless resources among themselves based on their quality of service (QoS) requirements, the underlying channel conditions and network topology. The scalable coding of the video content and decomposition of video flows into various sub-flows (priorities) allow peers to transfer the video at different quality levels, depending on the network load. Users collaboratively decide which of their sub-flows to admit, and which paths these sub-flows should be transmitted on in order to maximize a system defined utility. Our results show that with user collaboration, these distributed algorithms provide system and user performance comparable to a centralized exhaustive implementation.