Joint Forensics-Scheduling Strategy for Delay-Sensitive Multimedia Applications over Heterogeneous Networks

High quality multimedia forensics service is increasingly critical for delay-sensitive applications over heterogeneous networks. Up to now, it is a challenging problem, where the demand for less forensics overhead, higher authentication level and smaller transmission delay needs to be reconciled with the limited and often dynamic network resources. Traditional multimedia forensics mechanisms, however, either overlook the available network resource or neglect the interaction between multimedia forensics and network scheduling. This work presents a novel framework for delay-sensitive multimedia applications over resource-limited heterogeneous networks by jointly considering multimedia forensics, network adaptation, and deadline-driven scheduling. In particular, we develop a joint forensics-scheduling scheme, which allocates the available network resources based on the affordable forensics overhead and expected quality of service, adaptively adjusts the scalable media-aware forensics, and schedules the transmissions to meet the application's delay constraints. Through analysis and simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme not only can provide a satisfying multimedia forensics service with nearly full utilization of the network resource, but also can achieve substantial performance improvements compared to other reference approaches.