Joint Resource Allocation and User Association for SVC Multicast Over Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Scalable video coding (SVC) is attractive technology for multicasting video to users with different available transmission capacities. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of resource allocation and user association problems for SVC multicast over heterogeous cellular networks (HetNet) employing the schemes of cell range expansion (RE) and almost blank subframe (ABS). We solve the joint optimization problem by decoupling it into two problems, namely, resource allocation (RA) subproblem and user association (UA) master problem. For the RA subproblem, we propose a dynamic programming based algorithm to optimally set the transmission profile. For the UA master problem, we propose a similarity-based negotiation protocol (SBNP) based algorithm to obtain the Pareto-optimal range expansion bias. The simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of these algorithms.