Smart decision for device selection in D2D‐assisted multi‐path video transmission network

Watching the live video on a bus/train/tram has become an important pattern for people to enjoy their travel time. Due to the complex environment changes and obstacles caused by the rapid movement, the network state of the user device is often unstable. A large number of interruptions and resolution reductions seriously affect the user's watching experience. Through direct transmission between devices, Device‐to‐Device (D2D) can effectively improve video quality. Accurate decision for helper device selection is the key to optimize video streaming services based on D2D technology. However, the existing methods through D2D rarely consider the states and the intention of the helper devices when selecting cooperative devices, such as the watching status, the state of charge, the state of cache, and the connection quality. This is highly probable to reduce the efficiency of D2D transmission and the cooperation enthusiasm of helper devices. In addition, the existing methods seldom consider the multiple network interfaces in the device. In view of these challenges, we propose a dynamic smart decision method for device selection in D2D‐assisted multi‐path video transmission network (named DS‐DAMP). Specifically, this method takes the current states and the resource constraints into consideration to select the appropriate helper devices for video cooperative transmission, so as to improve the cooperation satisfaction of helper devices and optimize the video quality of the requesting device. Besides, we make full use of multiple network interfaces to realize multi‐path parallel transmission between devices. A large number of experiments have proved the good performance of our method in terms of video quality and network utility.