Auction based optimal subcarrier allocation for H.264 scalable video transmission in 4G OFDMA systems

In this paper, we present a price maximization scheme for optimal OFDMA subcarrier allocation for wireless video unicast/multicast scenarios. We formulate a pricing based video utility function for H.264 based wireless scalable video streaming, thereby achieving a trade-off between price and QoS fairness. These parametric models for scalable video rate and quality characterization are derived form the standard JSVM reference codec for the SVC extension of the H.264/AVC, and hence are directly applicable in practical wireless scenarios. With the aid of these models, we propose a novel auction based framework for revenue maximization of the transmitted video streams in the unicast and multicast 4G scenario. A closed form expression is derived for the optimal scalable video quantization step-size subject to the constraints of the unicast/multicast users in the 4G wireless systems. This yields the optimal OFDMA subcarrier allocation for multi-user scalable video multiplexing. Further, the proposed scheme is cognizant of the user modulation and code rate, and is hence amenable to adaptive modulation and coding(AMC) feature of 4G wireless networks. We simulate a standard WiMAX based 4G video transmission scenario to validate the performance of the proposed optimal 4G scalable video resource allocation schemes.