CAREER: New Paradigm for Wireless Multimedia Communication Systems with Resource and Information Exchanges

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Existing wireless networks provide dynamically varying resources with limited quality of service support for multimedia applications, which often results in unsatisfactory user experience. This research addresses these challenges by introducing a new communication paradigm that allows competing wireless stations to dynamically exchange communication and computation resources. This paradigm was inspired by a successful economics concept known as "coopetition", which suggests that a judicious mixture of competition and cooperation is advantageous in competitive environments. When applied to wireless multimedia systems, this research fundamentally changes the passive way stations currently adapt their transmission strategies to match available wireless and power resources, by enabling them to proactively influence the wireless systems dynamics through resource and information exchange. To achieve this, the investigator models wireless stations as rational players competing for available wireless resources in a dynamic repeated game. Optimal resource exchange policies are determined for different application requirements, wireless conditions, multimedia content, and different levels of collaboration and advantages of forming coalitions among applications/stations are explored. In the new proactive paradigm, the resource exchanges are made possible by adapting the transmission strategies of the participating stations. Currently, these strategies are optimized at the lower OSI layers without considering the multimedia traffic characteristics. This research develops a new cross-layer optimization framework that adapts to varying channel conditions and available resources, while explicitly considering the specific characteristics and requirements of wireless multimedia applications. Moreover, to enable different resource exchanges, user-centric scalable multimedia coding and streaming algorithms are investigated that consider the user experience and stations resources. This research considers both existing wireless networks and next-generation Spectrum Agile Radio networks in which stations can utilize multiple channels, thereby dynamically gathering additional resources to satisfy multimedia requirements.