Scalable video streaming for multicast in wireless networks

Multicast video streaming in a wireless network allows a group of users to watch video and share the scarce bandwidth at the same time. Since the channel quality of each client may be different, it is difficult to control the perceived video quality in a multicast group. To ensure the whole group receives the data, some multicast mechanisms use the client with the worst channel quality as a reference to decide transmission speed. However, it may result in very low average video quality. This paper proposes a scheme, namely Scalable Video Multicast, to maximize the average perceived video quality in a multicast group in wireless networks. The proposed scheme uses the property that different modulation coding schemes provide different transmission speed and have different transmission distances. Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and transmission rate scheduling are exploited to improve the average video quality perceived by the clients. The base layers of video frames provide basic visual quality to the clients. Rate scheduling applied on the enhancement layers improves the average visual quality. Simulations show that the proposed rate scheduling for SVC blocks can improve the average perceived video quality of multicast clients and outperforms other mechanisms in the literature.