Uplink scheduling of visual sensors: When view popularity matters

Decentralized camera sensors capture a 3D scene of interest from multiple perspectives. The captured video signals need to be transmitted to a central station over a shared wireless channel. A collocated server streams the gathered data to a collection of clients interested in experiencing the scene interactively. We design a constrained optimization framework for sharing the transmission bandwidth of the wireless channel across the sensors such that the average video quality over the client population is maximized. We consider scheduling the uplink resources of the wireless channel at the view or packet level. In the first case, the central station partitions the channel capacity across a select subset of views that are transmitted entirely. In the second case, the station coordinates the packet transmissions of every sensor. We formulate exact and approximate algorithms to solve the optimization of interest. We examine their transmission efficiency via simulation experiments that demonstrate considerable gains over the state-of-the-art and study the impact of view popularity.