QoS-Aware Scheduling and Resource Allocation for Video Streams in e-MBMS Towards LTE-A System

Given that statistical multiplexing of video streams is employed in enhanced Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (e-MBMS), we address the issue of scheduling across the streams towards Advanced-Long Term Evolution (LTE-A) system, in order to improve the quality of service (QoS) performances. In this paper, the optimization problem of scheduling and resource allocation for separate streams is first formulated. With practical considerations including the terminal power consumption and MBMS over a Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) operation, hence a suboptimum QoS-aware two-layer scheduling scheme is proposed to allocate resources among the streams. By separating streaming scheduling and packet sorting, the scheduler is aware of queue state information, fairness among the streams, and the frame weight. Simulations results with H.264/AVC coded video sequences show that significant gains could be observed by our scheme in terms of spectrum efficiency, QoS of packet loss, and video quality while maintaining the fairness among the streams.