Multipath Scheduling Algorithm for UAV Video Streaming
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摘要: 在无人机实时视频流传输场景中，可利用多路径传输协议的带宽聚合优势提升视频体验质量(QoE)。针对该协议在无人机网络环境下面临的动态异构挑战，该文提出一种基于NeuralUCB算法的多路径调度框架—NeuroFly。首先，将多路径流量调度建模为上下文多臂老虎机(CMAB)问题。然后，基于NeuralUCB设计在线学习策略：融合多维度异构特征构建上下文空间，引入帧优先级驱动的冗余传输机制构建动作空间，并结合多目标奖励函数设计，实现动态异构网络下的自适应流量调度。此外，还设计一种上下文监控机制，能够实时检测上下文分布变化并适时重启学习过程，以提升NeuroFly对环境突变的应对能力。最后，仿真和野外环境下的实验结果表明，与现有先进调度算法和传输方案相比，NeuroFly第99百分位延迟降低19.9～51.0%，并在多项视频QoE指标上取得显著领先：平均视频帧率提升最高达24.6%，图像结构相似性提升最高达49.2%，缓冲时间占比减少13.4～77.6%，证明其在无人机动态异构网络下具有更为出色的持续传输优化能力，能够有效降低传输延迟并提升视频QoE。Abstract:
Objective With the rapid development of the low-altitude economy, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies have been widely adopted in scenarios such as emergency rescue, disaster monitoring, and urban security. In these applications, achieving stable, low-latency, and high-fidelity video feedback is critical to mission success. Multipath transport protocols can leverage bandwidth aggregation to improve video Quality of Experience (QoE), thereby providing strong support for UAV video streaming. However, under dynamic and heterogeneous network conditions, the actual performance of multipath transport protocols is highly dependent on the design of multipath scheduling algorithms. To address the challenges posed by dynamic and heterogeneous networks, a variety of scheduling algorithms have been proposed. Heuristic-based schedulers employ carefully designed rules to mitigate head-of-line blocking and inter-path load imbalance to some extent, but their reliance on predefined strategies limits adaptability in highly dynamic environments. Learning-based schedulers, in contrast, continuously learn the mapping between network conditions and scheduling rewards from real-time feedback, enabling adaptive performance optimization. Nevertheless, most existing learning-based schedulers are designed for general network scenarios and are not specifically optimized for UAV networks, and their effectiveness in guaranteeing video QoE remains insufficiently validated. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a multipath scheduling algorithm tailored to UAV video streaming scenarios to fully exploit the performance potential of multipath transport protocols. Methods To address the dynamic and heterogeneous challenges faced by multipath transport protocols in UAV video streaming scenarios, this paper proposes NeuroFly, a multipath scheduling framework based on the NeuralUCB algorithm. In NeuroFly, multipath traffic scheduling is formulated as a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit (CMAB) problem. A context space is constructed by integrating path state information, video encoding features, and UAV mobility parameters to accurately characterize the transmission environment. In the action space, a frame-priority-driven redundancy transmission mechanism is introduced, where video frames are assigned different transmission priorities according to decoding dependencies, and differentiated redundancy strategies are applied to improve the probability of successful frame delivery. Furthermore, a multi-objective reward function is designed to guide the learning of optimal scheduling policies, enabling adaptive optimization under dynamic and heterogeneous network conditions. In addition, to cope with abrupt environmental changes caused by high UAV mobility, a context monitoring mechanism is integrated into NeuroFly to detect network variations and trigger a two-stage restart strategy. Specifically, a soft restart is activated when gradual context drift is detected to remove outdated historical experience, while a hard restart is performed upon abrupt changes by clearing the replay buffer and reinitializing model parameters to restart learning under a new distribution. Results and Discussions The proposed NeuroFly framework is extensively evaluated in both simulation and real-world environments. First, Mininet-WiFi is employed to simulate realistic UAV network environments to evaluate the overall video QoE performance. The results ( Fig. 4 ) indicate that, compared with state-of-the-art heuristic and learning-based schedulers, NeuroFly achieves comprehensive improvements by fully utilizing aggregated multipath bandwidth. Specifically, the 99th-percentile latency is reduced by 19.9-51.0%, the average video frame rate is increased by up to 24.6%, image structural similarity is improved by up to 49.2%, and buffering time ratio is reduced by 13.4-77.6%, demonstrating its superior capability in guaranteeing video QoE. In addition, real-world experiments (Fig. 6 ) further confirm that NeuroFly delivers favorable video QoE optimization compared to mature solutions already deployed at scale in production environments in real UAV operational scenarios, demonstrating strong practical applicability and holding promise for large-scale deployment across diverse UAV operation scenarios in the future.Conclusions This paper addresses the key challenges of dynamicity, heterogeneity, and high time variability faced by multipath transport protocols in UAV video streaming scenarios, and proposes an intelligent multipath scheduling framework based on the NeuralUCB algorithm, termed NeuroFly. In this framework, the multipath traffic scheduling problem is formulated as a CMAB problem. By carefully designing the context space, action space, and a multi-objective reward function, online learning and adaptive optimization of traffic allocation policies are achieved. In addition, to further enhance robustness under drastic environmental variations, a lightweight context monitoring mechanism is introduced to continuously detect context distribution drift and restart the learning process when necessary, thereby improving adaptability to abrupt environmental changes. Finally, systematic evaluations are conducted on both simulation platforms and real-world UAV operational environments to comprehensively assess the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art heuristic and learning-based schedulers, NeuroFly achieves consistent improvements across video QoE metrics. Real-world experimental results further indicate that, in real UAV operational scenarios, NeuroFly continues to provide favorable video QoE guarantees when compared with mature solutions that have been widely and long-term deployed in industrial practice. These results collectively validate the practicality, robustness, and engineering viability of NeuroFly, suggesting strong potential for large-scale deployment in UAV applications that are highly sensitive to real-time video quality, such as emergency response, power inspection, agricultural monitoring, and logistics delivery. -
1 NeuroFly多路径调度算法
输入：调度周期持续时间$ {T}_{\text{S}} $，冗余粒度参数$ K $ 输出：冗余率决策 (1) 初始化：神经网络参数$ {\theta }_{0} $，经验回放池$ M $ (2) for 时间步$ t=1,\cdots ,T $ do (3) 获取当前上下文观测$ \{{\boldsymbol{x}}_{t,{{a}_{s}}}\}_{s=0}^{K} $ (4) for each$ a\in \mathcal{A}=\{{a}_{0},{a}_{1},\cdots ,{a}_{K}\} $do (5) 计算动作$ a $的置信上界$ U_{t}^{a} $ (6) 令动作$ {a}_{t}=\arg {\max }_{a\in \mathcal{A}}U_{t}^{a} $ (7) end for (8) 执行动作$ {a}_{t} $，开始冗余传输 (9) 在调度周期结束时刻计算奖励$ {r}_{t} $ (10) 将样本$ \left\langle {\boldsymbol{x}}_{t,{{a}_{t}}},{r}_{t}\right\rangle $存入经验回放池$ M $ (11) 从$ M $中随机采样一个批次的历史经验 (12) 通过随机梯度下降更新网络参数$ {\theta }_{t} $ (13) end for 
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