Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO), with its spatial multiplexing and channel hardening, has the potential to provide high capacity and reliability for massive video services. In spite of this, massive MIMO in the physical layer does not fully showcase its abilities in video applications unless it is specifically designed to do so. In this paper, we consider a cell-free massive MIMO system as an edge node for scheduling massive streams, and thus the standard server-to-client transmission is split into server-to-edge and edge-to-client. When the server-to-edge transmission is ideal, edge schedules massive streams to alleviate user conflicts in cell-free massive MIMO. Moreover, we propose a novel edge-to-client grouping algorithm for assigning the streams with severe interference to different time slots. The proposed algorithm achieves an innovative.7-approximation ratio while keeping the group sizes within a certain range. When the server-to-edge transmission is non-ideal, we design a special transmission framework called Aggressive, wherein the server sends the next video chunk when the current chunk reaches the edge rather than the client. Thus, the proposed framework saves considerable server-to-edge latency compared with the traditional framework. Simulation results show that the proposed user grouping algorithm improves the achievable rate by around 18% and the Aggressive framework improves the average bitrate.

A long-standing vision of backscatter networks is to provide long-range connectivity and high-speed transmissions for batteryless Internet-of-Things (IoT). Recent years have seen major innovations in designing backscatter networks toward this goal. Yet, they either operate at a very short range, or experience extremely low throughput. This paper takes one step further towards breaking this stalemate, by presenting PolarScatter that exploits channel polarization in long-range backscatter networks. We transform backscatter channels into nearly noiseless virtual channels through channel polarization, and convey bits with extremely low error probability. Specifically, we propose a new polar code scheme that automatically adapts itself to different channel quality, and design a low-cost encoder to accommodate polar codes on resource-constrained backscatter tags. Furthermore, we devise a new metric to calculate log-likelihood ratio for accurate decoding, and present a stopping criterion of iterations to reduce decoding latency. We build a prototype PCB tag, and our experiments show that it achieves up to 11.5× throughput improvement over the state-of-the-art long-range backscatter solution. We also simulate an IC design in TSMC 65 nm LP CMOS process. Compared with traditional encoders, our encoder reduces storage overhead by three orders of magnitude, and lowers the power consumption to tens of microwatts.