Experimental study of utility function selection for video over IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area networks

Cognitive Radio (CR) is a new wireless communications and networking paradigm that is enabled by the Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology and a recent change in spectrum regulation policy. As the first commercial application of CR technology, IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area networks (WRAN) aim to offer broadband wireless access by efficiently utilizing ldquowhite spacesrdquo in the broadcast TV bands. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of an IEEE 802.22 WRAN base station (BS) cognitive engine (CE) testbed developed at Wireless@Virginia Tech on supporting video applications. We investigate the important problem of utility function selection and its impact on the received video quality. Through testbed experiments, we find that a video-specific utility function achieves significant improvements on received video quality over a general purpose utility function, indicating the efficacy of cross-layer design and more importantly, the need for adopting dynamic situation- and application-aware utility functions at the CE, rather than a predefined static one.