Queueing Analysis of Unicast IPTV With Adaptive Modulation and Coding in Wireless Cellular Networks

Unicast Internet protocol television (IPTV) services that can support live TV, video-on-demand, video conferencing, and online gaming applications over broadband wireless cellular networks have been becoming popular for many years. However, video streaming services significantly impact the performance of wireless cellular networks because they are bandwidth hogs. To maintain the system performance, effective admission control and resource allocation mechanisms based on an accurate mathematical analysis are required. On the other hand, the quality of a wireless link usually changes with time because of user mobility or time-varying channel characteristics. To counteract such time-varying channels and improve the spectral efficiency, an adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme is adopted in offering unicast IPTV services for mobile users. In this paper, closed-form solutions for the bandwidth usage, blocking rate, and dropping rate of unicast IPTV services over wireless cellular networks were derived based on the novel queueing model that considers AMC. Simulations were also conducted to validate the accuracy of analytical results. Numerical results demonstrate that the presented analytical results are accurate. Based on the accurate closed-form solutions, network providers can implement precise admission control and resource allocation for their networks to enhance the system performance.