QoS-Guaranteed Adaptive Modulation and Coding for Wireless Scalable Video Multicast

Multicast is a promising solution to address spectrum scarcity in wireless video streaming, while facing tough challenge in provisioning quality of service (QoS) to heterogeneous users. This article presents an adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme to accommodate both spatial diversity and temporal variation on users’ channel conditions for QoS provisioning in wireless scalable video multicast. The QoS-guaranteed AMC policy optimization is formulated as constrained stochastic optimization based on Markov decision processes. An adaptive policy iteration algorithm is developed to find the optimal AMC policy online without any prior knowledge of users’ channel statistics or intensive calculations. This algorithm is attractive due to adaptability to unknown environments and less run-time computation expenditure. Simulations results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.