QoS-aware energy-efficient multicast for multi-view video in indoor small cell networks

Multi-view video (MVV) consists of multiple video streams captured simultaneously by multiple closely spaced cameras and enables users to freely change their viewpoints by playing different video streams. Those close deployed cameras will capture overlapping frames (OFs) and then transmit OFs in multiple video streams. With the viewpoint change from one stream to another, redundant OFs in the latter stream can be useless for a user. Moreover, the redundant transmission will increase with the number of users and result in severe bandwidth waste for both base stations and users. In order to reduce the redundant transmission of OFs and increase energy efficiency (EE), a new architecture Overlapping Reduced Multi-view Video Transmission (ORMVVT), which is based on User dependent Multi-view video Streaming for Multi-users (UMSM), is proposed for downlink transmission of MVV in small cell networks (SCNs). Then, a novel resource allocation model is introduced to help users achieve different data rates according to their Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Contrarily, for the simplicity of implementation, existing schemes can only support a single reception data rate for all users in a multicast group. Further, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the EE with the QoS constraint of services. Finally, a suboptimal QoS-aware Energy-efficient Multicast Resource Allocation scheme (QEMRA) is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Numerical results show that the proposed low-complexity QEMRA scheme is able to get a close-to-optimal performance under general fading distributions.