Hierarchical Packet Scheduling for Satellite Multimedia Broadcasting: An Adaptive QoS-Aware Design

With the unique broadcast nature and ubiquitous coverage of satellite network, the synergy between satellite and terrestrial networks provides new opportunities for delivering wideband services to a wide range of audiences over extensive geographical areas. This paper concerns the optimization techniques pertinent to the packet scheduling to facilitate multimedia content delivery over the satellite with a return channel via terrestrial network. We propose a novel hierarchical packet scheduling (HPS) scheme, which allocates the resources at different parts of the network in an adaptive and QoS-aware manner, in response to traffic dynamics in the networks as well as link variations of each user. Simulations prove that the proposed HPS scheme can effectively improve the end-to-end performance and resource utilization.