Popularity based bandwidth allocation for video broadcast/multicast over wireless networks

Recently, video broadcast/multicast over wireless networks has created a significant interest in the field of wireless communication. However, the wireless resources have limitations to broadcast/multicast many video sessions at the same time with the best quality. Hence, during the video transmission through wireless networks, it is very important to make the best utilization of the limited bandwidth. When the system bandwidth is not sufficient to allocate the demanded bandwidth for all of the active broadcasting/multicasting video sessions, instead of allocating equal bandwidth to each of them, our proposed scheme allocates bandwidth per video session based on popularity of the video program. Using the mathematical and simulation analyses, we show that the proposed scheme maximizes average user satisfaction level. The simulation results also 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.