Real-time Live-Video Streaming in Delay-Critical Application: Remote-Controlled Moving Platform

Recent advancement in multimedia and communication network technology have made interactive multimedia and tele-operation applications possible. Teledriving, teleoperation, and video-based remote-controlling require real-time live-video streaming and are delay critical in principle. Supporting such applications over wireless networks for mobile users can pose fundamental challenges in maintaining video quality and service latency requirements. This paper investigates the factors affecting the end-to-end delay in a video-based, remotely controlled moving platform application. It involves the real-time acquisition of environmental information (visually) and the delay-sensitive video streaming to remote operators over wireless networks. This paper presents an innovative experimental testbed developed using a remote-controlled toy truck, off-the-shelf cameras, and wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) network. It achieves ultra-low end-to-end latency and helped us in performing the delay, network, and video quality evaluations. Extending the experimental study, we also propose a real-time live-media streaming control (RTSC) algorithm that maximizes the video quality by selecting the best streaming (network, video, and camera) configuration while meeting the delay and network availability constraints. RTSC improves the live-streaming video quality by about 33% while meeting the ultra-low latency (< 200 milliseconds) requirement under constrained network availability conditions.