2016/02/23 by Richard Combes, Combes, Richard, Habib Sidi +3
Computer Science · Engineering · #Advanced Wireless Network Optimization #Cooperative Communication and Network Coding #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Wireless Networks and Protocols
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1602.07112
openalex publication_date 2016/02/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate streaming over multiple links. A file is split into small units called chunks that may be requested on the various links according to some policy, and received after some random delay. After a start-up time called pre-buffering time, received chunks are played at a fixed speed. There is starvation if the chunk to be played has not yet arrived. We provide lower bounds (fundamental limits) on the starvation probability of any policy. We further propose simple, order-optimal policies that require no feedback. For general delay distributions, we provide tractable upper bounds for the starvation probability of the proposed policies, allowing to select the pre-buffering time appropriately. We specialize our results to: (i) links that employ CSMA or opportunistic scheduling at the packet level, (ii) links shared with a primary user (iii) links that use fair rate sharing at the flow level. We consider a generic model so that our results give insight into the design and performance of media streaming over (a) wired networks with several paths between the source and destination, (b) wireless networks featuring spectrum aggregation and (c) multi-homed wireless networks.