QoE-aware mobile association and resource allocation over wireless heterogeneous networks

Abstract

As video content delivery over wireless networks is expected to grow tremendously in upcoming years, how to support energy and bandwidth consuming video applications with high Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes a challenging issue in the future wireless networks. Clearly, there is an urgency for a new disruptive paradigm to bridge the gap between the increasing capacity plus energy demands and the scarce wireless network resources. In this paper, we propose a spectrum and energy efficient mobile association and resource allocation scheme in wireless heterogeneous networks based on two new performance metrics: video content aware or QoE-aware Energy Efficiency (QEE) and video content aware or QoE-aware Spectral Efficiency (QSE). QEE and QSE evaluate the power consumption and bandwidth consumption from video quality's perspective. First we conduct a fundamental study between QEE and QSE in a point-to-point wireless environment. Then we propose a mobile associations and resource allocation scheme in a heterogeneous wireless network that can optimize QEE and QSE. The system level problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem. Nonlinear fractional programming approach and dual decomposition method are applied to search the optimal solutions in a computationally efficient way.