Quality-Driven Cross-Layer Optimized Video Delivery over LTE

3GPP Long Term Evolution is one of the major steps in mobile communication to enhance the user experience for next-generation mobile broadband networks. In LTE, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access is adopted in the downlink of its E-UTRA air interface. Although cross-layer techniques have been widely adopted in literature for dynamic resource allocation to maximize data rate in OFDMA wireless networks, application-oriented quality of service for video delivery, such as delay constraint and video distortion, have been largely ignored. However, for wireless video delivery in LTE, especially delay-bounded real-time video streaming, higher data rate could lead to higher packet loss rate, thus degrading the user-perceived video quality. In this article we present a new QoS-aware LTE OFDMA scheduling algorithm for wireless real-time video delivery over the downlink of LTE cellular networks to achieve the best user-perceived video quality under the given application delay constraint. In the proposed approach, system throughput, application QoS constraints, and scheduling fairness are jointly integrated into a cross-layer design framework to dynamically perform radio resource allocation for multiple users, and to effectively choose the optimal system parameters such as modulation and coding scheme and video encoding parameters to adapt to the varying channel quality of each resource block. Experimental results have shown significant performance enhancement of the proposed system.