Cooperative multi-cell beamforming for MIMO unicast/ multicast broadband H.264 scalable video networks

In this paper we propose a novel scheme to jointly determine the optimal transmit/receive beamformers together with multi-user power allocation towards transmission rate maximization in a cooperative MIMO cellular wireless network for unicast/multicast scenarios. For the unicast scenario, we propose a successive constrained eigenbeamforming (SCEB) technique to reduce the inter-user interference and enhance the data rates subject to power constraints. This scheme is further extended to a multicast scenario (SCEB-M) to maximize the sum rate of a user group with group constraints on the transmit power. We also derive optimal schemes to efficiently schedule a subset of users/ groups from the active user set. We employ a practical H.264 scalable video quality model to demonstrate the performance of the presented schemes in realistic video streaming broadband wireless networks. Simulation results show that the proposed SCEB schemes achieve a superior data rate and video quality in comparison to conventional resource allocation schemes in cooperative cellular scenarios.