Interference-Aware Cross-Layer Design for Distributed Video Transmission in Wireless Networks

Cross-layer communication could bring a significant performance improvement for wireless communication systems through allowing information exchanges among multiple layers. For delay-sensitive video application, cross-layer optimization could be more critical by jointly considering the network resource allocation and application performance requirement, especially in an interference-limited distributed network. To improve the quality of video transmission over an ad hoc network, this paper proposes a cross-layer scheme to maximize the average received video quality by jointly considering the application performance and network transmission strategy. In this scheme, important system parameters including the distribution of the node and the resulting interference, link transmission policy, and queueing delay, as well as the video encoding rate are jointly considered to achieve the best received video quality. To this end, a threshold-based transmission strategy and an interference approximation model are developed first. Then, the queueing delay is analyzed based on the M/M/1 queue model. Finally, the problem of maximizing video transmission quality is formulated as a cross-layer optimization problem. To solve this optimization problem, a distributed algorithm is proposed based on the optimization and game theories. The convergence performance of this distributed algorithm is analyzed and shown with relatively lower complexity through simulation. Furthermore, both numerical and simulation results show that the proposed scheme improves the system performance considerably based on the comparison with other two existing schemes.