A resource allocation algorithm for OFDM-based cellular system serving unicast and multicast services

In this article, we propose a resource allocation algorithm for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-based cellular system that serves users each of which requests a regular service or a multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS). We assume that the MBMSs are considered for video services such as mobile TV. In order to efficiently serve the users with heterogeneous channel conditions, we employed channel-adaptive video streams by using scalable video coding (SVC), where a realistic multicast configuration is considered for multicasting the SVC streams. Therefore, we designed the cellular system to serve constant and flexible bit rates for the regular services and the MBMSs, respectively. Thus, we consider three objectives when allocating the bandwidth resources, where total transmit power is regulated. First, the bit rate of each regular service has to be guaranteed. Second, the minimum bit rate of each MBMS for achieving the minimum video quality has to be guaranteed. Third, the average video quality of the users requesting MBMSs has to be maximized. In order to achieve the objectives, we propose to quantify the service quality of each service, and then find the resource allocation that maximizes the total service quality. By using the computer simulation results, we could verify that the three objectives can efficiently be achieved. Also, we could verify that the performance of the proposed algorithm is superior to that of the previous algorithm designed to maximize the total bit rate while guaranteeing the minimum bit rates. © 2013 Kim et al.