Channel-aware video softcast scheme

The main challenge of wireless video multicast is to support receivers´ heterogeneous characteristics and realize graceful degradation of video quality. The newly emerged Softcast provides smooth video quality for wireless multicast based on raw orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels but its performance suffers when transmitted over practical wireless fading channels. This paper proposes a new Channel-Aware Softcast (Softcast-CA) scheme to address the case of practical multipath fading instead of the raw one. Softcast-CA selects the subcarriers with better channel qualities to transmit video in an analog-like fashion. The simulation results show that Softcast-CA scheme achieves up to 3 dB improvement compared with the original Softcast in the scenarios of unicast and multicast.