Congestion-distortion optimized scheduling of video over a bottleneck link

Recent research on multimedia scheduling has focused on minimizing the rate-distortion cost of transmission policies. This tradeoff only partially reflects the network congestion a media stream may generate on bandwidth-limited channels. We introduce the concept of congestion-distortion optimized streaming and propose a scheduler which attempts to minimize the Lagrangian cost of end-to-end delay and media distortion. Experiments for video on a simulated network illustrate the performance of the scheduler. Compared to a state-of-the-art scheduler, the proposed algorithm reduces end-to-end delay by approximately 50% while improving the video quality by up to 3 dB.