FALCON: joint fair airtime allocation and rate control for DASH video streaming in software defined wireless networks

Software Defined Wireless Networks offer an opportunity to enhance the performance of specific services by applying centralized mechanisms which make use of a global view of the network resources. This paper presents FALCON, a novel solution that jointly optimizes fair airtime allocation and rate recommendations for Server and Network Assisted DASH video streaming, providing proportional fairness among the clients. Since this problem is NP-hard, FALCON introduces a novel heuristic algorithm that is proved to achieve almost optimal results in a practical amount of time. The performance of FALCON is evaluated when used in conjunction with three referent Adaptive Bit Rate strategies (PANDA, BOLA and RobustMPC) in a simulated ultra-dense In-flight Entertainment System scenario. The obtained results show that FALCON provides significant benefits by minimizing instability and buffer underruns, while obtaining a fair video rate and airtime allocation among clients, thus contributing to an enhanced Quality of Experience.