Resource Allocation for Loss Tolerant Video Streaming in eMBMS

Abstract: Bandwidth hungry video content has become the dominant contributor to the data traffic world over. Cellular networks are constantly evolving to meet the growing traffic demands. Over the past few years, wireless multicast has been garnering a lot of attention as a means of efficient resource utilization. Multicast transmission lets spectral resources to be shared between users streaming the same content. Even though multicast transmission allows to serve multiple users on the same resources, in order to serve all these users successfully, the base station cannot transmit the content at a rate greater than that decodable by the user with the worst channel conditions. In this paper, we propose a way to overcome this bottleneck. Video streaming services can sustain a certain amount of packet loss without any significant degradation in the quality experienced by the users. We leverage this loss tolerant nature of video streaming applications to improve the performance of multicast video services in LTE and 5G. We convert the problem of resource allocation for loss tolerant multicasting into the problem of stabilizing a queueing system. We then propose two throughput optimal Maximum Weight (MW) policies that successfully stabilize the constructed queueing system. However, brute force implementation of MW policies is mostly NP-hard. To overcome this, we propose a maximum weight bipartite matching approach that results in a polynomial time implementation of the proposed policies. We also evaluate the performance of our policies via extensive simulations.