Video Quality Provisioning for Millimeter Wave 5G Cellular Networks With Link Outage

Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a promising solution for future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks to offer extremely high capacity. Because of the propagation characteristics of mmWave band, 5G users with high mobility in metropolitan areas could suffer frequent link outages resulting in challenges on video quality provisioning. In this paper, a playout buffer is used to regulate and maintain the video playout quality. We formulate the problem of using dynamically allocated bandwidth to charge the buffer as a Markov decision process (MDP), aiming to maximize video playout quality for all the users moving in the whole coverage area. Dynamic programming is adopted to solve the MDP problem with state aggregation considering the characteristics of mmWave network. Numerical results demonstrate that the resultant optimal policy of the MDP model can effectively maintain video playout quality for high-mobility users with intermittent mmWave connection.

I. Introduction

Future 5G cellular networks come with fundamental changes to satisfy the overwhelming capacity demands, brought on by the continuing advances and discoveries in computing and communications [1]– [4]. 5G cellular networks are expected to provide data rates of multi-Gbps range for bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements (e.g., uncompressed video streaming requires mandatory rate of 1.78 or 3.56 Gbps). To achieve this, more spectrum availability is essential. Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is a very promising solution for future 5G cellular networks to overcome the global bandwidth shortage at saturated microwave spectrum for most commercial access technologies [1].