QoE-based Video Delivery over LTE Hierarchical Architecture

This work focuses on Quality of Experience (QoE) based scheduling of multiple video flows on the downlink of LTE/LTE-A system. The LTE/LTE-A network architecture is not built for QoE-based video delivery. LTE/LTE-A enables Quality of Service (QoS) based traffic prioritization. QoS allows network operators to split traffic into flows based on attributes such as traffic type (streaming video, real-time video or VoIP) and traffic needs (packet delay, jitter or throughput). In this work, we consider scalable video layers mapped to QoE-based priority classes at the core network. At the Radio Access Network (RAN), packets of different priority classes receive different forwarding treatment (scheduling and queue management). In the recent approaches, the QoE marked packets are dropped by utilizing a packet dropping algorithm, and scheduled by employing a QoS-aware scheduler. In this work, we proposed a QoE-based priority class aware scheduling approach which, under congestion, does not require a packet dropping algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed approach not only conforms to the LTE/LTE-A hierarchical architecture but also delivers to the end users a better QoE as delivered by the state-of-the-art cross-layer approaches.