Quality-aware fair downlink scheduling for scalable video transmission over LTE systems

Relying on cooperative game theory and in particular on the Nash bargaining solution (NBS), we propose in this paper a downlink scheduling strategy for scalable video transmission to multiple users over Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) systems, such as the recent LTE/LTE-A wireless standard. We propose a novel utility metric based on video quality to be used in conjunction with our quality-driven scheduler. Results show that our proposed strategy outperforms throughput based strategies and in particular it enables the operator of the mobile system to select the level of fairness for different users in a cell based on its business model. The system capacity in terms of satisfied users can be increased by 20% with the proposed quality-based utility in comparison with advanced, state-of-the-art throughput based strategies.