QoE-Driven Cross-Layer Design for Device-to-Device Video Delivery

This paper investigates the video delivery on the underlay device-to-device (D2D) communications. Considering that the distributed scheme requires less signaling overhead than the centralized one, we exploit Stackelberg game to establish a QoE-driven distributed cross-layer video delivery model to optimize the parameters which include the RB-level transmission power at the physical layer, a group of RBs at the data link layer and source coding rate at the application layer. In the model, the evolved NodeB (eNB), as a leader, plays an important role in guiding D2D pairs to reuse wireless resources intelligently. D2D pairs, as followers, achieve the goal of maximizing their individual quality of experience (QoE) by competing selfishly in a non-cooperative game. We prove the existence of the Stackelberg equilibrium for the established Stackelberg game model in mathematics and propose a QoE-driven Distributed Cross-layer Video-delivery (QDCV) scheme to reach the Stackelberg equilibrium. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme can achieve the Stackelberg equilibrium of the whole system in a relatively short time and our proposed scheme improves the average MOS by about twice compared with the existing QoE scheme.