Opportunistic Proportional Fair Downlink Scheduling for Scalable Video Transmission over LTE Systems

We consider in this paper downlink scheduling at the MAC layer for delay sensitive traffic in wireless systems based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA). We propose a downlink scheduling strategy for scalable video transmission to multiple users over OFDMA systems, such as the recent LTE/LTE-A wireless standard. We use a payoff metric based on video frame importance in conjunction with our proposed scheduler. The priority function on each Physical Resource Block (PRB), considering video frame importance and bit throughput, efficiently exploits multi-user diversity as compared to state-of-the-art strategies. Simulation results confirm the efficient utilization of time and frequency diversity by showing an improvement in the objective video quality of each user as compared to state-of-the-art strategies.