Optimising Layered Video Content Delivery Based on Satellite and Terrestrial Integrated 5G Networks

Multimedia delivery over satellite network may be considered as a promising service in the emerging 5G cellular system. However, content delivery over the satellite link poses an enormous challenge to the service provider due to its long latency. The objective of this paper is to develop a video streaming framework over satellite and terrestrial integrated 5G content delivery infrastructure, which is investigated in the EU 5GPPP phase 2 SaT5G Project where satellite link is used as an additional channel as 5G backhaul. In this work, clients send SVC (Scalable Video Coding) layer download request to the Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) server, which is able to dynamically select a backhaul link (Satellite or terrestrial) for each layer download request according to specific contexts. The purpose is to achieve optimised content load distribution between the two types of 5G backhaul links. Experiments conducted reveal that the proposed framework is able to achieve a good traffic offloading percentage without compromising with QoE of the end-user.