Joint server/peer receiver-driven rate-distortion optimized video streaming using asynchronous clocks

This paper proposes a joint server/peer video streaming architecture for wireless networks, where a receiver can access a video server via an access point using the infrastructure mode and at the same lime communicate with its peers using the ad hoc mode of its IEEE 802.11 interface card. We introduce a joint infrastructure/peer-to-peer, receiver-driven streaming scheme, and formulate it as a combinatorial optimization problem. We decouple the problem into two steps: first selecting the sender (server or peer) by introducing asynchronous clocks, and then applying point-to-point rate-distortion optimization algorithm between a specific sender-receiver pair. Simulation results show that our joint approach has better performance than those systems with single server or with round-robin selection scheme.