Chunk-Based Resource Allocation with Fairness Consideration for Layered Multicast Streaming in OFDMA Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the multicast resource allocation problem for video streaming in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems. The video streams are encoded into base layer (BL) and enhancement layer (EL) data by the hierarchical video coding (HVC) scheme. The basic resource unit is a set of contiguous subcarriers (chunk). The problem is formulated to maximize the sum of logarithms of group throughput with constraints on BL rate requirement and average Bit Error Rate (BER) over a chunk to achieve proportional fairness (PF) among multicast groups. A modified suitability metric is defined for chunk assignment between BL and EL, and a low complexity algorithm which can fairly allocate chunks to multicast groups is proposed to solve the optimization problem. Simulation results show that our proposal is beneficial to fairly allocate chunks among the multicast groups with a low outage probability.