Dynamic MBSFN Subframe Allocation Algorithm for Bursty Video Traffic in LTE-Advanced Network

The limited radio-frequency spectrum is a major problem for wireless communications, especially for the 4G and SG systems which are expected to offer very high transmission rates. One of the most prominent solutions for this problem is to utilize efficiently the limited resources to transmit various services including the high bandwidth-consuming audio and video applications. Multimedia broadcast/multicast service (MBMS) is actually a point-to-multipoint service allowing efficient usage of network resources. The current MBMS specification uses a semi-static resource allocation mechanism for Multicast services, which is not suitable for services with Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic profiles, such as live video streaming. In this paper, we propose a dynamic subframe allocation algorithm which can dynamically adjust the resource allocation for MBMS transmission to adapt to the fluctuation of the VBR traffic within MBMS Single-Frequency Networks (MBSFN). The basic idea of the proposed mechanism is to reallocate periodically the MBSFN resources based on a linear prediction model of the required resources. The simulation results show that this proposed algorithm can reduce the unused MBSFN resources which could be used for unicast transmissions, without violating the fairness constraint. Moreover, we show that our algorithm outperforms the static allocation procedure in terms of unused MBSFN resources.