Scalable video downlink multicasting in multi-cell cellular wireless networks

Abstract

We consider adaptive rate scheduling for downlink multicasting of video streams, using scalable video coding (SVC) over cellular wireless networks. The structure of the SVC video encoding process is used to offer mobiles video streams at variable quality of experience (QoE) levels. For this purpose, we classify cell users into groups, based on their experienced SINR (signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio) levels. Users that belong to a higher SINR group are offered higher QoE-based streams. To examine the incentives of a service provider in offering streams of different QoE levels to different user groups, we define a QoE price-ratio. The latter expresses the ratio of the revenues gained in streaming a video flow to a user at higher vs. lower quality levels. To mitigate inter-cell interference, we employ a Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) scheduling scheme, whose configuration is hereby optimized. We show the proposed optimally configured adaptive rate multicast scheduling schemes to offer enhanced performance behavior, in effectively adapting the video quality of the multicast streams to users' SINR values and in using the optimal FFR scheduling configuration to mitigate interference.