Transmission of Scalable Video Coding over Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

Deployment of small cells is considered as one of the most promising solutions for increasing the capacity and coverage of the wireless networks. The networks consisting of different base station levels are called heterogeneous cellular networks (HCN). In such networks, cell range expansion is applied for offloading more users from the macro base station (MBS) to the femtocell access point (FAP). In this paper, we use the structure of HCNs for transmission of scalable video coding (SVC). For two-layer spatial scalable video, due to the umbrella coverage of a macrocell, MBS is suitable for transmission of the base layer content to the users within its coverage. Moreover, the enhancement layer is transmitted via the FAP because of its high data rate. Using the tools from stochastic geometry, we derive the rate distributions of the users receiving the base layer. Moreover, we quantify two performance metrics, which are the standard-definition (SD) outage probability and the high-definition (HD) probability. We prove that offloading more users by the cell range expansion and resource partitioning improve the HD probability.