Tradeoffs in video transmission over wireless heterogeneous networks: Energy, bandwidth and QoE

In this paper, we propose a multi-objective optimization framework to address the joint mobile association and resource allocation problem in a video transmitted wireless heterogeneous network. We consider user quality of experience (QoE) as one of the design objectives together with two other performance metrics to characterize the design tradeoffs among perceived video quality, power consumption, and network resource consumption. In order to find the Pareto optimal solutions for a multi-objective optimization problem, we first apply weighted Tchebycheff approach to aggregate multiple objectives and minimize the Tchebycheff distance between the optimal solution and utopia solution. Dual decomposition technique is then introduced to decompose the above mentioned problem into a series of similar subproblems. By using linear relaxation and variable transformation, standard convex optimization method is applied to solve these subproblems efficiently and the optimal mobile association and resource allocation are obtained. System level simulation studies numerically demonstrate the tradeoffs among three design objectives and provide an insightful understanding on the performance compromise under multi-objective conditions.