Bandwidth sensing errors in network systems: A case study of video rate adaptation

Sensing errors may occur in the form of inaccurate and/or delayed reporting of system and/or external events. For example, the reports of traffic congestion on a road may be imprecise: both in the time of occurrence and the traffic intensity level, due to the very nature of traffic sampling and analysis processes. The sensing errors may skew the control actions performed by an adaptive network system S on its external environmentand hence contribute to control errors. In our approach, a model-based treatment of sensing errors allows quantifying their impact on the control accuracy. Our paper describes a software cybernetics framework to deal with the measurement errors on available network bandwidth that arise during the operations of a bandwidth-adaptive video transport system.