Clustering based Transcoding for Congestion Control in Wireless Networks

Multimedia applications such as video conferencing and media streaming require service guarantees and demand strict timing requirements. Limited network resources along with heterogeneous client devices usually act as a limiting factor on the seamless global delivery of multimedia data. The key issue that needs to be addressed in adaptation and delivery of such multimedia data to diverse devices is to strike a balance between usage of network resources and the quality of delivered content. In this paper we propose a transcoding approach for video streaming to heterogeneous mobile client devices over a wireless network with limited resources and bandwidth. Our approach is based on: (a) Clustering client devices based on their capabilities to determine the format of content suitable for them; (b) Adapting content appropriate to the determined content formats by transcoding and achieving reduction in content size by removing redundant information from content in the process of transcoding; (d) Using subscriber distribution and the devices they own to optimize the number of versions of content; and (e) Using transcoding to further reduce the size of content for each device cluster while maintaining the quality of content.