Mobile Live Video Streaming Optimization via Crowdsourcing Brokerage

Abstract

Nowadays, people can enjoy a rich real-time sensing cognition of what they are interested in anytime and anywhere by leveraging powerful mobile devices such as smartphones. As a key support for the propagation of these richer live media contents, cellular-based access technologies play a vital role to provide reliable and ubiquitous Internet access to mobile devices. However, these limited wireless network channel conditions vary and fluctuate depending on weather, building shields, congestion, etc., which degrade the quality of live video streaming dramatically. To address this challenge, we propose to use crowdsourcing brokerage in future networks which can improve each mobile user's bandwidth condition and reduce the fluctuation of network condition. Further, to serve mobile users better in this crowdsourcing style, we study the brokerage scheduling problem which aims at maximizing the user's quality of experience satisfaction degree cost effectively. Both offline and online algorithms are proposed to solve this problem. The results of extensive evaluations demonstrate that by leveraging crowdsourcing technique, our solution can cost-effectively guarantee a higher quality view experience.