Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation and Scheduling for Multicast of Scalable Video Over Wireless Networks

In this paper, we investigate optimal resource allocation and scheduling for scalable video multicast over wireless networks. The wireless video multicasting is a best-effort service which has limited transmission energy and channel access time. To cater for multi-resolution videos to heterogeneous clients and for channel adaptation, we adopt scalable video coding (SVC) with spatial, temporal and quality scalabilities. Our scalable video multicast system consists of a channel probing stage to gather the channel state information and a transmission stage to multicast videos to clients. We formulate the optimal resource allocation problem by maximizing the video quality of the clients subject to transmission energy and channel access constraints. We show that the problem is a joint optimization of the selection of modulation and coding scheme (MCS), and the transmission power allocation. By imposing a quality-of-service (QoS) constraint on the packet loss rate, we simplify the original problem to a binary knapsack problem which can be solved by a dynamic programming approach. Specifically, we first propose a multicast scheduling scheme based on the quality impact of each SVC layer. Guided by the content-aware multicast scheduling, we optimize the resource allocation for each SVC layer sequentially. Solution at each step takes into account of the channel condition, remaining resources, and client requirements. The proposed scheme is of linear complexity and leads to the maximized video quality for the admitted clients, while satisfying the energy budget and channel access constraints. Experiment results demonstrate that our scheme achieves notable video quality improvements for multicast clients, when compared to the state-of-the-art video multicast method.