Dynamic configuration of single frequency networks in mobile streaming systems

Abstract

Although the capacity of cellular networks has increased with recent generations, the growth in demand of wireless bandwidth has outpaced this increase in capacity. Not only more users are relying on wireless networks, but also the demand from each user has substantially increased. For example, it has become common for mobile users to stream full TV episodes, sports events, and movies while on the go. Further, as the capabilities of mobile devices improve, the demand for higher quality and even 3D videos will escalate, which will strain cellular networks. Therefore, efficient utilization of the expensive and limited wireless spectrum remains an important problem, especially in the context of multimedia streaming services that consume a large portion of the wireless capacity. In this paper, we introduce the idea of dynamically configuring cells in wireless networks to form single frequency networks based on the multimedia traffic demands from users in each cell. We formulate the resource allocation problem in such complex networks with the goal of maximizing the number of served multimedia streams. We prove that this problem is NP-Complete, and we propose a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Through detailed packet-level simulations, we show that the proposed algorithm can achieve substantial improvements in the number of streams served as well the energy saving of mobile devices. For example, our algorithm can serve up to 40 times more users compared to the common unicast streaming approach, and it achieves at least 80% and up to 400% improvement compared to multicast approaches that do not use single frequency networks.