An Optimized Hybrid Unicast/Multicast Adaptive Video Streaming Scheme Over MBMS-Enabled Wireless Networks

Mobile multimedia services have been increasingly popular. However, radio resources are limited. The quality of experience of all users in wireless networks can be enriched by resource allocation, which is affected by many factors in current wireless networks. In this paper, we focus on a hybrid unicast-multicast (HUM) video streaming scheme, and develop an adaptive resource allocation framework for HUM by combining adaptive cooperative transmission and base station handoff. The optimization problem is formulated as a multi-dimensional, complexity-constrained nonlinear NP-hard problem. To solve the problem, a greedy algorithm and a genetic algorithm are proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme has superior performance than other transmission methods in the literature. The genetic algorithm has better performance, but the greedy algorithm can maintain better balance between performance and resource consumption.