Power-Efficient Resource Utilization in Cellular Multimedia Multicast

With advancements in wireless communication technologies, broadband wireless services will be prevalent in the near future. Meanwhile, the capability of mobile devices is drastically increasing the mobile data usage, which is far in excess of mobile network capacities. Therefore, despite the high availability of these networks, the large scale of users they support, and their improved spectral efficiencies, effective utilization of wireless resources is still required to keep up with the ever increasing user demands for mobile services. This paper targets high-throughput data transmission in advanced cellular wireless networks that have been widely used for broadband access and are constantly enhanced for future applications. We present a power-efficient resource allocation solution to meet the transmission requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications -- video streaming. In particular, our design strategically groups mobile users into multicast groups with different video quality requirement, and utilizes cellular resource to meet their video requirements. We compare our proposed methods with state-of-the-art solutions and prove their effectiveness: our design achieves 5% to 18% improvement in base station power consumption, and 13% to 25% improvement in user device power conservation.

I. Introduction

Cellular wireless networks provide wide-area wireless access to mobile users. Long term evolution (LTE) of third generation partnership project (3GPP) is a promising radio access technology for mobile communication systems. Spectral and power efficiency, enhanced peak data rates, finalization of LTE-advanced in 2011, and cost-effectiveness of adoption for service providers are the reasons behind LTE being the technology of the choice [1]. Today, LTE can support at least 200 active users with data usage in every 5 MHz cell spectrum. Even though spectral efficient, advanced cellular networks need even more enhanced spectrum solutions to accommodate new applications with higher data rates. Enhanced multimedia broadcast and multicast services (eMBMS) is a video streaming and download solution provisioned for LTE-advanced [2], which targets high throughput spectral efficiency through multicast.