FALCON: joint fair airtime allocation and rate control for DASH video streaming in software defined wireless networks

Abstract

Software Defined Wireless Networks offer an opportunity to enhance the performance of specific services by applying centralized mechanisms which make use of a global view of the network resources. This paper presents FALCON, a novel solution that jointly optimizes fair airtime allocation and rate recommendations for Server and Network Assisted DASH video streaming, providing proportional fairness among the wireless DASH clients. Since this problem is NP-hard and its resolution in dense scenarios is too computationally expensive to be applied in practice, FALCON introduces a novel heuristic algorithm that is proved to achieve almost optimal results in a significantly lower time. The performance of FALCON is also evaluated when used in conjunction with three referent Adaptive Bit Rate strategies (PANDA, BOLA and RobustMPC) in a simulated realistic ultra-dense scenario based on an In-flight Entertainment System with up to 175 clients. The obtained results show that FALCON provides significant benefits by minimizing instability and buffer underruns, while obtaining a fair video rate and airtime allocation among clients, thus contributing to an enhanced Quality of Experience.