Efficient multimedia content delivery over cooperative 3G and broadcasting networks

As wireless communications are enhanced towards "beyond 3G" (B3G), multicast transmission is attracting more and more attention because it offers a more cost-effective provision of the multimedia content than the traditional unicast transmission. In this context, a problem emerges regarding the multimedia content delivery in a B3G environment, as users are reachable through several overlapping wireless access networks, which potentially are multicast-enabled. A mechanism is proposed in this paper to address this problem. The objective is to determine the best access network and the QoS level for each user in order to maximize the overall utilities in the system. This is achieved by three functions, namely, service scheduling (SS), network selection (NS) and QoS adaptation (QoSA), SS utilizes multicast transmission capability to save radio resource by scheduling a copy of the multimedia content to a group of users. NS and QoSA enable intelligent network resource allocation in overlapping multicast-enabled networks while respecting users\´ preferences and QoS expectation. Simulation results confirm the significant benefit of the proposed mechanism