A joint source coding-power control approach for video transmission over CDMA networks

We consider future generation wireless code-division multiple-access (CDMA) cellular networks supporting heterogeneous compressed video traffic and investigate transport schemes for maximizing the number of users that can be supported in a single cell while simultaneously maximizing the reconstructed video quality of individual users. More specifically, we demonstrate that the network resources consumed by an individual user in a spread-spectrum CDMA network can be taken as the product of the allocated source-coding rate R_s and the energy per bit normalized to the multiple-access interference noise density γ_b. We propose a joint source coding and power control (JSCPC) approach for allocating these two quantities to an individual user, subject to a constraint on the total available bandwidth, to simultaneously maximize the per-cell capacity while maximizing the quality of the delivered video to individual users. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using the ITU-T H.263+ video source coder, although the approach is generally applicable to other source-coding schemes as well. The results indicate a significant improvement in delivered quality-of-service (QoS), measured in terms of the end-user average peak signal-to-noise ratio, that can be achieved at a given level of network loading. Furthermore, we demonstrate that without an appropriate JSCPC strategy the traditional soft-capacity limit associated with CDMA networks is no longer present. Indeed, a precipitous decrease in performance can be expected with increasing load. We show that this behavior can be avoided with the proposed JSCPC approach, thereby significantly extending the useful capacity of the CDMA network while exhibiting a more graceful degradation pattern under increasing load.