Abstract
The described system and method provide joint rate control and scalable stream adaptation for multiple clients concurrently competing for the same access networks. For each such client, an optimization problem is constructed and solved to determine the streaming rate over each access network, the video packets to be transmitted, and the access network over which each video packet is sent. The rate control and stream adaptation problem is constructed as an integer program in an embodiment of the invention, with an objective to minimize a cost function of the expected video distortion. Randomized packet scheduling is accounted for in an embodiment of the invention by relaxing the integer program into real-valued optimization programs and deriving convex programming approximations.