Scalable Video Multicast in Hybrid 3G/Ad-Hoc Networks

Mobile video broadcasting service, or mobile TV, is expected to become a popular application for 3G wireless network operators. Most existing solutions for video Broadcast Multicast Services (BCMCS) in 3G networks employ a single transmission rate to cover all viewers. The system-wide video quality of the cell is therefore throttled by a few viewers close to the boundary, and is far from reaching the social-optimum allowed by the radio resources available at the base station. In this paper, we propose a novel scalable video broadcast/multicast solution, SV-BCMCS, that efficiently integrates scalable video coding, 3G broadcast, and ad-hoc forwarding to balance the system-wide and worst-case video quality of all viewers at 3G cell. We solve the optimal resource allocation problem in SV-BCMCS and develop practical helper discovery and relay routing algorithms. Moreover, we analytically study the gain of using ad-hoc relay, in terms of users' effective distance to the base station. Through extensive real video sequence driven simulations, we show that SV-BCMCS significantly improves the system-wide perceived video quality. The users' average PSNR increases by as much as 1.70 dB with slight quality degradation for the few users close to the 3G cell boundary.