Terminal-Edge-Cloud Collaboration: An Enabling Technology for Robust Multimedia Streaming

To reconcile the conflict between ceaselessly growing mobile data demands and the network capacity bottleneck, we exploit the terminal-edge-cloud collaboration to design a streaming distribution framework, SD-TEC, with the major objective to avoid streaming interruptions caused by inter-cluster handovers and corresponding user defections. First, the merge-and-split rule in the coalition game is employed for virtualized passive optical network clustering to structurally reduce the inter-cluster handover frequency. Second, the terminal-edge collaboration leverages device-to-device communications to sustain streaming services when inter-cluster handovers inevitably occur, reducing the time of possible streaming interruptions and improving the quality of experience of multimedia services. Lastly, the edge-cloud collaboration proactively caches streaming contents to alleviate the traffic congestion of peak hours and considers user priorities and buffer queue underflow/overflow to manage both fronthaul and backhaul resources. Simulation results validate the efficiency of our proposed SD-TEC in reducing the traffic congestion and streaming interruptions caused by inter-cluster handovers.