Power-Efficient Resource Utilization in Cellular Multimedia Multicast

Abstract

With advancements in wireless communication technologies, broadband wireless services will be prevalent in the near future. Meanwhile, the capability of mobile devices is drastically increasing the mobile data usage, which is far in excess of mobile network capacities. Therefore, despite the high availability of these networks, the large scale of users they support, and their improved spectral efficiencies, effective utilization of wireless resources is still required to keep up with the ever increasing user demands for mobile services. This paper targets high-throughput data transmission in advanced cellular wireless networks that have been widely used for broadband access and are constantly enhanced for future applications. We present a power-efficient resource allocation solution to meet the transmission requirements for bandwidth-intensive applications -- video streaming. In particular, our design strategically groups mobile users into multicast groups with different video quality requirement, and utilizes cellular resource to meet their video requirements. We compare our proposed methods with state-of-the-art solutions and prove their effectiveness: our design achieves 5% to 18% improvement in base station power consumption, and 13% to 25% improvement in user device power conservation.