Bidirectional Bandwidth Coordination under Half-Duplex Bottlenecks for Video Streaming

Abstract

As video streaming users largely access the Internet via wireless local area networks (WLANs), the WLAN hop could still often be the bottleneck from time to time. Since WLAN channels are half-duplex, their capacity tends to be fairly acquired by the uplink and downlink traffic. However, many popular bidirectionally volumetric streaming applications like video conferencing may want an unfair bandwidth allocation, since the upstream quality is sometimes more decisive to the application performance. Existing rate controlmechanisms are unidirectional and could not achieve the desired unfair bandwidth allocation under WLAN half-duplex bottlenecks. Therefore, we propose Yongyule, to bidirectionally coordinate the upstream and downstream bandwidth share under half-duplex bottlenecks to enhance the application performance. We evaluate our mechanisms with simulations and testbed experiments, and results show that Yongyule could improve the average throughput of video streaming applications by up to 34-130%.

Jing Chen

Ph.D. of Computer Networking

My research interests include low-latency network transport, interactive video streaming and wireless networks.