Bilateral Bargaining-Based Adaptive Video Transmission: A Frame Rate Perspective

As one of the latest features of ultra-high-definition media services, high frame rate can significantly enhance perceptual quality, but also increases codec complexity in the transmission chain, leading to additional overhead. In this paper, we carry out comprehensive offline experiments in which the codec overhead (e.g., energy and delay) shows a linear or even quadratic increase trend with various frame rates, while correspondingly, when the frame rate increases to 75FPS, its bitrate is 24.2% lower than that under 15FPS for several scenarios. This illustrates that the overhead is more significant than the load from data traffic in the frame rate control problem. Thus, we propose a Bilateral Adaptive video Transmission framework that establishes Bilateral game-theoretic Control (BAT-BC) between sender and viewer. Through dynamically adjusting frame rate for sender and service payment for viewer, BAT-BC can flexibly adapt to the external environment such as computational state and scenario changes and it is expected to provide viewers with a smoother experience. Furthermore, we extend it to the scenario including concurrent multi-viewer and discuss the effects of grouping utility. Finally, we design a prototype system and the proposed solution is deployed on it to evaluate the performance. The frame drop rate is reduced by 61%, resulting in a 31% improvement in subjective QoE. The objective metric achieves the same level of actual experience as a fixed 60 FPS under dynamic environment.