Minimum Background Fairness for Quality Video Delivery over the LTE Downlink

High quality video delivery over LTE is a challenging issue due to limited radio resources of the LTE base station. This paper presents a study on the dilemma problem for allocating radio resource blocks between video and background flows in the LTE downlink. We propose a new concept called minimum background fairness (MBF) and combine it with our earlier idea called generalized largest weighted delay first (GLWDF) to avoid resource starvation of background traffic while achieving high-quality prioritized services of differentiated video packet types. Our preliminary results show that MBF cannot only guarantee a better minimum level of fairness in resource allocation to background traffic than FLS (a lately new design based on a so-called two-level scheduling), but also achieve video transmission quality gains over all the conventional single-level schedulers as well as FLS. In particular, such performance gains are amplified during medium to heavy congestions.