Optimal Cross-Layer flow-control for wireless Maximum-Throughput delivery of VBR media contents

Emerging media overlay networks for wireless applications aim at delivering Variable-Bit-Rate (VBR) encoded media contents to nomadic end-users by exploiting the (fading-impaired and time-varying) access capacity offered by the "last-hop" wireless channel. In this application scenario, a still open question concerns the design of control policies maximizing the average throughput over the wireless last-hop, under constraints on the maximum connection bandwidth allowed at the Application (APP) layer, the queue-capacity available at the data-link (DL) layer, and the average and peak transmit energies sustained by the Physical (PHY) layer. The main feature of the approach we follow relies on the maximization (on a per-slot basis) of the throughput averaged over the fading statistics and conditioned on the queue-state. The resulting optimal controller is rate-based and operates in a cross-layer fashion that involves the APP, DL and PHY layers of the underlying protocol stack. This means that the proposed controller dynamically allocates connection bandwidth at the APP Layer, throughput at the DL layer and transmit energy at the PHY layer by basing on both current queue and channel states. The carried out numerical tests give insights about the connection bandwidth-vs.-queue delay tradeoff attained by optimal controller. ©2009 IEEE.