Radio Resource Management for Broadcast Services in OFDMA-Based Networks

The next generation of wireless networks (LTE, WiMAX and UMB) will have sufficient capacity to support video broadcasts in addition to unicast services such as voice and data. Since broadcast services are resource intensive, radio resources must be carefully managed to ensure proper operation of the unicast services. One approach is to allocate a fixed set of resources (a zone) specifically for broadcast services. Therefore traffic shaping must be used to ensure that sufficient resources are available for all broadcast streams. In this paper we discuss one approach to this traffic shaping issue. We also address the issue of scheduling the broadcast streams over the zone allocated for broadcast services. This scheduler is designed for low terminal power utilization, low channel switching delay and high broadcast channel utilization. Simulations with video traces are used to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheduler.