Delay-aware adaptive wireless video streaming in edge computing assisted ultra-dense networks

Server and Network Assisted Dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP (SAND) is a promising technology to cope with the dramatic increase in video streaming traffic. The new emerging Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) paradigm may further facilitate bitrate adaptation and video transcoding in a SAND system with the help of local edge servers. A critical issue in MEC-SAND framework is to guarantee Quality of Experience (QoE) for clients while achieving efficient utilization of edging network resources. In this paper, we aim to develop an adaptive video delivery scheme to minimize the delay in MEC assisted ultra-dense networks. In our scheme, each client is mapped to a server that better fits its requirements and transmission condition, and a bitrate selection mechanism is exploited to decide the best video version for the client. Besides, time-consuming transcoding tasks are carefully scheduled considering edge computing capacity. We formulate a Mix-Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) problem to jointly determine cell association, bitrate adaption, and computing resource allocation. We exploit the generalized Benders decomposition method to reduce the solving complexity of the formulated problem. Numerical results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.