  Adaptive bitrate (ABR) streaming enables video users to adapt the playing
bitrate to the real-time network conditions to achieve the desirable quality of
experience (QoE). In this work, we propose a novel crowdsourced streaming
framework for multi-user ABR video streaming over wireless networks. This
framework enables the nearby mobile video users to crowdsource their radio
links and resources for cooperative video streaming. We focus on analyzing the
social welfare performance bound of the proposed crowdsourced streaming system.
Directly solving this bound is challenging due to the asynchronous operations
of users. To this end, we introduce a virtual time-slotted system with the
synchronized operations, and formulate the associated social welfare
optimization problem as a linear programming. We show that the optimal social
welfare performance of the virtual system provides effective upper-bound and
lower-bound for the optimal performance (bound) of the original asynchronous
system, hence characterizes the feasible performance region of the proposed
crowdsourced streaming system. The performance bounds derived in this work can
serve as a benchmark for the future online algorithm design and incentive
mechanism design.
