Video Quality-Based Spectral and Energy Efficient Mobile Association in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The staggering mobile growth is shaping to be the biggest shift in technology since the advent of the Internet, paving the way for unprecedented and yet to be thought of video services and applications. The proliferation of these mobile devices and applications, however, requires new paradigms to satisfy the increasing demands for capacity and energy, and achieve a good video quality. In this paper, we propose a video quality-based framework for spectrum and energy efficient mobile association and resource allocation in heterogeneous wireless networks. The basic tenets of the framework are (1) two novel performance metrics, namely QSE and QEE, to capture spectrum usage and energy consumption from video quality’s perspective; and (2) a computationally efficient optimization model to derive mobile association and resource allocation for video connections in heterogeneous wireless networks. To this end, we first study the fundamental tradeoff between QSE and QEE in a PtP Rayleigh fading wireless channel. We then study QSE and QEE at the system level and develop a mobile association and resource allocation scheme that aims to jointly optimize system level QSE and QEE. The problem is formulated as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem. Nonlinear fractional programming approach and dual decomposition method are applied to search the optimal solutions in a computationally efficient way. The simulation results evaluate the performance tradeoff between QSE and QEE, and show that the system performance, including PSNR distribution and maximum QSE/QEE values, greatly depends on bandwidth and power decaying factors.