Media streaming cost optimization for heterogeneous three-tier wireless networks

Heterogeneous networking is considered a key solution for accommodating the increasing demand in resources due to the pervasiveness of smart phones and resource demanding applications such as video streaming. The system heterogeneity creates amble opportunities to benefit from the diversity in cost, coverage, and resource availability in the integrated technologies. This work exploits such diversity to minimize the streaming session cost for users traversing three-tier integrated systems. This problem is typically too complex and its solution contradicts with both the processing capabilities of mobile devices and the handoff delay requirements. Hence, we formulate a simplified version of the problem as a non-linear program. Our simulation results show the optimized streaming algorithms achieve significant cost savings in comparison to the typical greedy streaming behavior.