Smart routing: Fine-grained stall management of video streams in mobile core networks

Video traffic has dominated the global mobile data traffic and creates the fundamental need for continuous enhancement and fast evolution in mobile networks so as to accommodate its unprecedented growth. Despite the surging interests in radio access networks (RANs), the latest technologies on dense and heterogeneous wireless networks are shifting the bottleneck of mobile networks to the core networks. However, managing the stalls of video streams in mobile core networks remains challenging. In an evolving mobile system, the core network needs to (i) determine the data rate for each video streaming request, (ii) distribute the video request among multiple sources, and (iii) route the so-generated peer-to-peer flows. In this paper, we exploit user context and propose an optimized routing scheme (termed as smart routing) for stall management in mobile core networks, which adaptively schedules data rates with respect to user context and strategically routes so-scheduled video demands. The proposed smart routing scheme simultaneously addresses the above three aspects by formulating them in a joint optimization problem and solving the formulated problem with a fast algorithm with provable approximation guarantee. Computer simulations validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme.