SSIM-based video admission control and resource allocation algorithms

The exponential growth of video traffic in mobile networks calls for the deployment of advanced video admission control (VAC) and resource management (RM) techniques in order to provide the best quality of experience (QoE) to the end user according to the available network resources. The degradation of the QoE perceived by the user when reducing the source rate of a video typically depends on the content of the video itself. In this paper, we analyzed the QoE of a group of test video sequences encoded with H.264 advanced video codec at different rates, i.e., quality levels. The QoE is objectively expressed in terms of the average structural similarity (SSIM) index. Based on empirical results, we propose a 4-degree polynomial approximation of the SSIM as a function of the coded video rate. We hence propose to tag each video with these polynomial coefficients that provide a compact description of its specific SSIM behavior, and to use this information in VAC and RM algorithms to optimally manage a shared transmission medium. As a proof of concept, we report selected simulation results that compare QoE-aware and QoE-agnostic algorithms in a scenario with a single link shared by multiple concurrent video flows.