Quality-oriented Rate Control and Resource Allocation in Time-Varying OFDMA Networks

In this paper, we propose a resource management scheme for on-demand video streaming in orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) networks with both time-varying channels and a user's personalized quality requirement. We design a user quality satisfaction model to evaluate the degree of the user quality satisfaction with respect to his/her personalized quality requirement. To perform the dynamic resource management, we propose a joint rate control (RC) associated with the quality adjustment at the application layer and resource allocation (RA) associated with the power allocation and subcarrier assignment at the physical layer. By using the Lyapunov optimization technique, we develop a joint RC and RA (JRCRA) algorithm to maximize the time-averaged quality satisfaction of all users (QSAU). We show that the QSAU achieved by the JRCRA algorithm without any prior knowledge of the channel statistics can arbitrarily attain the optimal QSAU achieved by the algorithm with a complete knowledge of the channel statistics. Simulation results verify the advantages of the proposed JRCRA algorithm.