Robust Video Broadcast for Users with Heterogeneous Resolution in Mobile Networks

Recently, robust video transmission system that can eliminate the cliff effect in digital video transmission has attracted great interest from both academia and industry. By linearizing the whole system, robust video transmission is intrinsically scalable to channel conditions in mobile networks. However, the heterogeneity of user devices in terms of viewing resolution has not been well studied for robust video broadcast systems. In this paper, we propose a spatial scalability enabled robust video broadcast (SSRVB) system, aiming at accommodating diverse users with both heterogeneous resolutions and heterogeneous channel conditions. In SSRVB, a novel spatial decomposition method based on linear projection is first designed for robust video transmission. Then the transmission distortion minimization problem with joint subcarrier matching and power allocation is formulated. A near-optimal low-complexity subcarrier matching algorithm based on auction theory and an optimal power allocation strategy are also proposed. Furthermore, an iterative algorithm is designed to solve the problem of joint resource allocation. Simulation results demonstrate that SSRVB can achieve an average of 3 dB gain when compared with the reference schemes (i.e., ECast, MCast, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based scheme, and scalable video coding (SVC) scheme) in terms of average peak signal-to-noise ratio under heterogeneous scenarios.