QoE-Oriented Resource Efficiency for 5G Two-Tier Cellular Networks: A FemtoCaching Framework

Abstract

Video streaming applications and services (VASs) consume an enormous amount of scarce resources in mobile devices and cellular wireless networks due to the demand for high data rates of video streaming. The limited resource of wireless media and unreliable nature of wireless channels in cellular networks make VASs challenging to deliver videos at high quality of experience (QoE). Therefore, in this paper, we propose a femtocaching framework of QoE-oriented resource efficiency optimization for high performance of cooperative VASs over 5G two-tier cellular networks, where the collaboration between macro base stations (BSs) and femtocells are exploited to efficiently deliver videos to mobile users (MUs). Our proposed framework aims at solving two problems. The first problem is how to cache the videos in femtocells to minimize the bandwidth resource consumed at the BSs and wasted at femtocells while guaranteeing high hit rate and utilizing the available storage resource of femtocells. The second one is how to encode the videos into descriptions and assign them to each femtocell for transmission, so as to minimize the reconstructed distortion of received videos for high playback quality at the MUs. The simulation results are further provided to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed framework.