Scalable video broadcast in cellular networks: impact on QoS and network resources

Abstract

Broadcast video streaming represents an important service which will be provided by 4G networks. The current video compression in use, the H.264/AVC (Advance Video Coding), is capable of providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous video compression standards. The scalable extension of AVC, SVC (Scalable Video Coding), enables a source to transmit a video composed of multiple quality, temporal and spatial sub-streams. The flexibility offered by SVC is appealing for broadcast streaming services, where heterogeneous devices and sets of users are supported. SVC combined with MAC scheduling and the flexibility offered by different modulation and coding schemes provide a novel solution for broadcast streaming services. In this paper, we propose a generic optimization framework to evaluate the performance of the current standard used for streaming services, AVC, and its scalable extension SVC, in terms of wireless utilization, storage requirements and perceived video quality for a single-site transmission scenario. This framework can be implemented on mobile multimedia broadcasting systems, such as ISDB-Tmm [1]. ISDB-Tmm currently considers AVC as video codec, but can be extended to support SVC as well. Selected simulations show the benefits provided by using SVC for broadcast video streaming in a single cell network making use of a flexible MAC layer scheduling. Our study is then extended to a multi-cell network, discussing the issues related to practical deployments.