Energy Saving Multicast Mechanism for Scalable Video Service Using Opportunistic Scheduling

In this paper, we focus on energy-efficient opportunistic multicast scheduling design method and user sleeping mechanism for the scalable video transmission in a wireless network. The goal is to minimize the total energy consumption for the terminal when receiving streaming video with bandwidth constraint and users' minimum QoS requirements. To utilize opportunistic multicast scheduling, unequal erasure protection (UXP) scheme is used for scalable video at the application layer. Considering the encoding characteristics and unequal protection scheme of scalable video, the UXP frame-level QoS is defined. And a low-complexity scheduling algorithm is proposed by transforming frame-level QoS requirement into slot-level QoS requirement within each time slot dynamically. Performance evaluations are firstly conducted for general data service with unlimited number of transmission rates, and then extended to scalable video service with limited number of transmission rates. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm has less energy consumption of all the multicast users than the conventional scheduling schemes with the same users' QoS requirements guaranteed in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks.