Analog Coded SoftCast: A Network Slice Design for Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast

This paper presents a network slice design for ultra high definition (UHD) video broadcast/multicast to achieve higher network efficiency and improved quality of experience (QoE). The proposed network slice design consists of a rateless source compression scheme and an analog-coded SoftCast scheme. The rateless Spinal code is adopted to compress the video source at content server and the compressed source is transmitted from content server across wireless core network to the base station. An a priori information-assisted Spinal decoder is designed to utilize the sparsity of bit planes for compression. In the analog-coded SoftCast scheme, we design a new chaotic function-based analog code with negligible power penalty for the generalized Gaussian-distributed source in SoftCast because the existing chaotic functions designed for uniformly distributed sources suffer from serious power penalty in SoftCast. We also design a maximum a posteriori probability decoding algorithm for the proposed analog code in order to exploit the statistics of video source as a priori information to improve the performance. The experimental results show that the proposed rateless code-based compression scheme achieves efficient compression and approaches the bound of binary erasure channel. In particular, the 1/2 analog-coded SoftCast has almost 2 dB gain over conventional SoftCast with two repetitions, and the 1/3 analog-coded SoftCast has almost 3 dB gain over conventional SoftCast with three repetitions. The system simulations for the broadcast system show higher network capacity and improved QoE in the proposed UHD slice, because the reconstructed video quality of each user is commensurate with its channel condition.