Scalable Modulation for Scalable Wireless Videocast

In conventional wireless systems with layered architectures, the physical layer treats all data streams from upper layers equally and apply the same modulation and coding schemes. Newer systems such as Digital Video Broadcast start to introduce hierarchical modulation schemes with SuperPosition preCoding (SPC) and support data streams of different priorities. However, SPC requires specialized hardware and has high complexity beyond most existing handheld devices. We thus propose scalable modulation (s-mod) by reusing the current mainstream modulation schemes with software-based bit-remapping. In this paper, we study how to optimize the configuration of the PHY layer s-mod and coding schemes to maximize the utility of videos with Scalable Video Coding (SVC). Simulation results demonstrate significant performance gains using s-mod and the cross-layer optimization, indicating s-mod and SVC is a good combination for wireless video multicast.