Quality-Aware Popularity Based Bandwidth Allocation for Scalable Video Broadcast over Wireless Access Networks

Video broadcast/multicast over wireless access networks is an attractive research issue in the field of wireless communication. With the rapid improvement of various wireless network technologies, it is now possible to provide high quality video transmission over wireless networks. The high quality video streams need higher bandwidth. Hence, during the video transmission through wireless networks, it is very important to make the best utilization of the limited bandwidth. Therefore, when many broadcasting video sessions are active, the bandwidth per video session can be allocated based on popularity of the video sessions (programs). Instead of allocating equal bandwidth to each of them, our proposed scheme allocates bandwidth per broadcasting video session based on popularity of the video program. When the system bandwidth is not sufficient to allocate the demanded bandwidth for all the active video sessions, our proposed scheme efficiently allocates the total system bandwidth among all the scalable active video sessions in such a way that higher bandwidth is allocated to higher popularity one. Using the mathematical and simulation analyses, we show that the proposed scheme maximizes the average user satisfaction level and achieves the best utilization of bandwidth. The simulation results indicate that a large number of subscribers can receive a significantly improved quality of video. To improve the video quality for large number of subscribers, the only tradeoff is that a very few subscribers receive slightly degraded video quality.