Optimal Channel-Time Allocation for the Transmission of Multiple Video Streams Over a Shared Channel

When multiple video streams are delivered from a single server to multiple clients over a time-shared channel that may support differing transmission speeds depending on the client, the problem arises of how to optimally divide channel time among the streams so that the overall quality of the decoded videos is maximized. This paper presents solutions to this allocation problem for three optimization objectives: minimizing the MSE of the decoded video over all the streams, maximizing the PSNR over all the streams, and minimizing the maximum MSE (equivalent to maximizing the minimum PSNR). Each is shown to be a convex problem which can be solved quickly using standard techniques. This paper then investigates the question of which objective should be used. Subjective tests were conducted to determine how well allocations made according to the various objectives correspond to the preferences of human test subjects. Results indicate, surprisingly, that the minimum MSE objective corresponds best to subjective preferences