QoS-driven and fair downlink scheduling for video streaming over LTE networks with deadline and hard hand-off

Long-term evolution (LTE) represents a promising technique for ubiquitous multimedia communication because of its significant enhancement to the data transmission rate. However, the hard hand-off (HO) procedure standardized in LTE is a menace to multimedia quality of service (QoS), due to the service interruption introduced by the procedure. Thus, one major challenge of such a system is to design an effective scheduler that can guarantee quality-of-service (QoS) to users under various mobility scenarios, including the hard HO procedure. Existing downlink scheduling approaches do not consider the characteristics of the video sources together with the service degradation evoked by hard HO, and therefore are unable to meet the QoS requirements of multimedia consumers. In this paper, we develop a QoS-driven downlink scheduling scheme for video streaming that considers both QoS metrics of video packet deadline and hard HO service degradation, in order to guarantee the QoS requirements of multimedia consumers. It will be demonstrated that the proposed scheduler is not only able to achieve satisfactory QoS for users during HO period, but also offers fairness for both multimedia traffic and regular data traffic. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed scheme.