We explore the performance gains due to multi-agent packet scheduling where there are multiple active nodes organizing the packet transmissions along the network path between a server-client pair. To this end, we design an optimization framework that coordinates the multiple scheduling agents such that an end-to-end quality-rate performance metric is maximized. We study experimentally the performance benefits due to multi-agent scheduling relative to single-agent scheduling and conventional server-driven streaming, as a function of the number of intermediate nodes at which the packet scheduling is carried out. We quantify analytically the performance gains and match them with high accuracy to simulation data.

Figure 1. Multiple intermediate agents schedule the data delivery from the sender (S) to the receiver (C).