QoS-Aware Scheduling and Resource Allocation for
Video Streams in e-MBMS towards LTE-A System
Chong Lou
Personal Communication Network & Spread Spectrum Lab
Univ. of Science and Technology of China
Hefei, Anhui, China
Email: louchong@mail.ustc.edu.cn
AbstractGiven that statistical multiplexing of video streams is
employed in enhanced Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service
(e-MBMS), we address the issue of scheduling across the streams
towards Advanced-Long Term Evolution (LTE-A) system, in
order to improve the quality of service (QoS) performances. In
this paper, the optimization problem of scheduling and resource
allocation for separate streams is first formulated. With practical
considerations including the terminal power consumption and
MBMS over a Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) operation,
hence a suboptimum QoS-aware two-layer scheduling scheme is
proposed to allocate resources among the streams. By separating
streaming scheduling and packet sorting, the scheduler is aware
of queue state information, fairness among the streams, and the
frame weight. Simulations results with H.264/AVC coded video
sequences show that significant gains could be observed by our
scheme in terms of spectrum efficiency, QoS of packet loss, and
video quality while maintaining the fairness among the streams.
Keywords-e-MBMS; statistical multiplexing; video streaming;
two-layer scheduling; QoS; H.264/AVC
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless network has been on the verge of a 3rd growth, and
it is predicted that the future traffic will be dominated by video.
Multicast/Broadcast plays an important role in delivering such
bandwidth-hungry video-based applications [1]. Following the
trend, Multimedia Broadcast/Multicast Service (MBMS) is first
defined as a point-to-multipoint service for UMTS. In order to
maintain its competiveness, 3GPP began the projects of LTE
and LTE-A. LTE systems specified e-MBMS to gain higher
spectrum efficiency, where the remarkable gain from macro
diversity leads to the deployment of MBSFN operation [2].
H.264/AVC is the currently specified codec in e-MBMS for
video streaming applications [3]. This poses a challenge of the
efficient use of radio resources due to its higher traffic burst.
Therefore, the function of statistical multiplexing is proposed
in e-MBMS system [4]. By multiplexing some parallel streams
into a bundle, the traffic variability decreases obviously. Most
of the existing studies, as with [5] [6], all focus on the resource
allocation schemes for the bundle. Aiming to further reduce the
amount of discarded packets caused by expiration, the issue of
scheduling is first stressed [7], by which our work is motivated.
Our main contribution is to devise such a scheduler towards
LTEA system, so as to improve the QoS performances.
In our study, we first formulate the optimization problem of
resource allocation for separate streams. Then, we show that it
This work is supported by the National Basic Research Program of China
(973) under Grant No.2007CB310602, National Major Science & technology
Project of China under Grant No.2008ZX03003-004, and 2009ZX03002-001.
978-1-4244-8327-3/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE
Ling Qiu
Personal Communication Network & Spread Spectrum Lab
Univ. of Science and Technology of China
Hefei, Anhui, China
Email: lqiu@ustc.edu.cn
is reduced to the problem of packet scheduling. Various packet
scheduling strategies for video transmission over wireless have
been discussed including [8]-[10]. Regarded as a delay-limited
capacity problem, The Earliest Deadline First (EDF) strategy is
put forward to satisfy the delay constraints in [8]. Moreover, in
content-aware schemes, the importance of the scheduled packet
for decoders is considered as well [9] [10], i.e., Minimization
Cost (MC) strategy. Nevertheless, these strategies dont refer to
e-MBMS system due to the following considerations. (I). each
OFDM-based frame including multi-subcarriers is apt to be
scheduled to the data from more than one stream. Obviously, it
is inappropriate for multicast in view of power consumption,
since each terminal needs to decode more frames including the
data for its desired contents. [11]. (II). as for MBSFN, the data
entity is separated from the control entity. The control entity
which is responsible for allocating resources has no idea of the
related factors used by packet scheduling [6].
To resolve the problems above, we propose a suboptimum
scheduling scheme, called the QoS-aware two-layer scheduling.
The innovations lie in (I). it is up to specification of e-MBMS
that a frame is allocated to one stream, thus the terminal is
enabled to turn into sleep mode during several frames, when its
undesired streams are being transmitted [12]. (II). the process
of resource allocation is divided into two layers. In the long-
term scheduling, we add the QoS-aware Scheduling Module
(QASM) to the control entity, and it is able to acquire the
information of queue state from the data entity, such as the
packet urgency and fairness, to help decide the transmission
order of streams. After that, the data entity ensures the prior
transmissions of more important packets based on the frame
weight in the short-term scheduling. Simulations results show
that our scheme performs well in exhaustive QoS metrics
including spectrum efficiency, packet loss, and video quality,
while maintaining the adequate fairness among the streams.
The remainder is organized as follows: Sec. II provides a
overview of e-MBMS architecture. The optimization problem
that we consider is formulated in Sec. III and our scheme is
described in Sec. IV respectively. Simulation results are given
in Sec. V. Finally, Sec. VI summarizes our conclusions.
II. SYSTEM OVERVIEW
A conceptual architecture in this paper is provided in Fig. 1.
Multicast/Broadcast Service Center (BM-SC) takes charge of
service announcements and session management. It determines
 as Least Channel Gain (LCG) scheme. i.e., transmitting power
is determined by the worst user who has the minimum
subchannel gain. Function f (.) demonstrates the power with the
unity channel gain, which depends on the specific MCS [14].

f (cn ,,t ) n , k ,t
max Pn,t , t (2)
k
sS , k =1,2,, K
hn2, s ,t
The weight wk is introduced to generalize the problem. By
changing the value of wk, (RAVe) could cover different packet
scheduling strategies. We assume that the objective function is
a weighted sum of rate for all the video streams. The problem
Figure 1. e-MBMS System Architecture can be formulated as follows
T K N
which streams can be multiplexed. MBMS-Gateway (MBMS-
GW) ensures that the same content is sent to all the evolved
(RAVe) max
n ,k ,t , cn ,t
w [ (
t =1 k =1
k
n =1
n, k ,t cn,t )] (3)
Node Bs (eNB) synchronously within the MBSFN Area, and
s.t.
performs statistical multiplexing. At the beginning of a MCH
K
Scheduling Period (MSP), Multi-cell/Multicast Coordination
Entity (MCE) is responsible for allocating the resources to all k =1
n, k , t = 1, n, t (4)
the eNBs uniformly, such as the transmission order1 and the N
concrete Modulation & Coding Scheme (MCS). Inside the eNB
itself, multi-streams with the same QoS requirements could be
P
n =1
n ,t PT , t , (5)

multiplexed onto one Multicast Channel (MCH). After that,
actual scheduling for data is employed in MAC layer based on
the amount of its stored data and results of resource allocation
[12] [13]. Suppose that the difficulties in synchronization are
resolved effectively in LTE-A system, we could easily deduce
that the action of each eNB is identical.
where (4) ensures that each pair of RBs can be used for only
one stream in each TTI. PT represents the total power.
The problem is known to be NP-hard for nonlinear integer
programming. To simplify the defined problem, we consider
MBSFN operation. Observation 1 implies a reduced form.

In LTE system, QoS Class Identifier (QCI) may be used for Observation1.Besides the strict constraints of synchronization
scheduling. However, as static QoS profile, it is insufficient for among the eNBs, MBSFN transmission requires that all the
the multiplexed streams, because they have the same QCI. To RBs belonging to one MCH are dedicated to all the users with
improve the performance of scheduling, we consider adding the same MCS [12]. In other words, it could be expressed as
the QASM to MCE as Fig. 1. It acquires the related dynamic cn , t = c , n , t (6)
QoS information from eNB through the existing interface (M2).
The detailed operation will be described later in Sec. IV. With the help of the observation 1, the control variable cn,t
is replaced by a constant c eventually. If the transmit power is
assigned to each pair of RBs equally, the constraint (5) could
III. PROBLEM FORMULATION be removed. In general, the reduced problem becomes
A. General Problem Definition T K N
(RAVe-sfn) max wk [ (n , k ,t c)] (7)
We consider a general problem of Resource Allocation for n ,k ,t
t =1 k =1 n =1
Video streams in e-MBMS (RAVe) in one eNB. K streams are
s.t.
included in the bundle and there are totally N pairs of Resource K
Blocks (RB) in a Transmission Time Interval (TTI), of which
one RB consists of 12 consecutive subcarriers and 1 slot in k =1
n, k , t = 1, n, t. (8)
frequency and time domain respectively. TTI is the minimum When RB n in TTI t is allocated to the streaming k, Wn,k,t,
time unit for scheduling that is comprised of two slots, so one the achievable weighted rate of streaming k is equivalent to
subchannel consists of a pair of RBs [12]. T TTIs in one MSP
have been determined to be allocated. The binary indicator Wn, k ,t = wk c (9)
n,k,t is used to show that if streaming k utilizes the pair n of Therefore, (RAVe-sfn) becomes one of finding the largest
RBs in TTI t or not. value of Wn,k,t when allocating resources. i.e., it degenerates as
1,if the pair n of RBs is used by streaming k in t a problem of packet scheduling as equation (10). To resolve
n , k , t = (1) the problem, packet scheduling is considered in the following.
0, otherwise
k * = arg max wk . (10)
Let Sk be the set of users for streaming k. hn,s,t denotes the k =1,2, K

subchannel gain of user s over the pair n of RBs in TTI t. eNB

decides the power level Pn,t and the number cn,t of bits to carry B. Conventional Packet Scheduling
over the pair n of RBs in TTI t. With these notations, the In OFDM systems, the conventional scheduling strategies
transmitting power meets inequality (2), where it is expressed always take the time and frequency selectivity into account.

1
transmission order is generated by MCE to rule the action of eNB, when one
MSP starts. It implies that, multi-streams are scheduled one by one according
to such order. It is efficient in reducing signaling overhead and terminal power
consumption [13].
In MBSFN operation, there is no actual multi-user diversity. The fairness is earliest proposed in unicast systems [17],
Therefore, EDF in e-MBMS (MEDF) could be generalized as we adopt it into the e-MBMS system. scheduled_totalk is the
throughput of streaming k during a period. received_totalk is
1 the amount of received packets in this period for streaming k.
(MEDF) wk _ MEDF ( m) = , (11)
deadlinek , m t
After acquiring DT and FP, QASM would determine the
where deadlinek,m denotes the decoding line of mth video frame streaming weight as
of streaming k. Similarly, MC in e-MBMS, i.e., MMC, could
be generalized as received_totalk delayHoL
wsk = exp( ). (17)
scheduled _ totalk PDBk
1
(MMC) wk _ MMC ( m) = I k , m (12) Finally, the transmission order in the bundle is determined
deadlinek , m t
along with QCI for non-multiplexed streams. The stream in
( N P + 1 m) the bundle with a larger wsk is prior transmitted.
( N + 1) for I or P frame
P
I k ,m = , (13) B. Packet Sorting
1
for B frame To improve the video quality at receivers, the scheduler in
( N P + 1)( N B + 1)
eNB performs the packet sorting at TTI-level after streaming
where NP and NB denote the number of P frames and B frames scheduling, called Cost-based Sorting Strategy (CS).
in one Group of Pictures (GoP) respectively. Ik,m denotes the
The binary indicator k is used to show whether the
frame weight of mth frame of streaming k. We assume that
streaming k is scheduled completely or not, that is, whether
eNB could identify the frame type with the method described
there is any packet left in the queue to be scheduled.
in [15]. Therefore, Ik,m could be determined based on the frame
type (I, P, or B) and its position in a GoP as equation (13)[16]. 0, if the streaming k is scheduled completely
k = . (18)
According to our previous discussions, it is easy to see that 1, otherwise
such strategies at TTI-level are not applicable combining the The corresponding streaming k*, which is to be scheduled
fact. We consider dividing wk into two parts that are executed could be determined by the following equation
at the MSP-level and TTI-level respectively. Accordingly, a
novel scheduling scheme is presented in Sec. IV. k * = arg max wsk k . (19)
k =1,2, K

With the help of equation (19), for a determined streaming

IV. TWO-LAYER SCHEDULING SCHEME
k*, CS could be described as (20)
In this section, a QoS-ware two-layer scheduling scheme
is devised, where wk is divided into the streaming weight wsk m* = arg max I k * , m , (20)
m
and frame weight Ik,m. In the first layer streaming scheduling, where the more important packet with a higher frame weight
streaming weight is determined by MCE at MSP-level. And is prior allocated in CS during the MSP. Generally, QoS-
then, eNB performs the packet sorting based on the results of aware Two-Layer Scheduling can be described as follows
streaming scheduling at TTI-level.
QoS-aware Two-layer Scheduling Scheme
A. Streaming Scheduling 1) Initialization
With the help of QASM, the following parameters offered a) Set k = 1 for all k {1,2, ,K}.
by eNBs at the end of MSP, would help MCE to decide the b) Set n,k,t = 0 for all n {1,2, ,N}, k {1,2, ,K}, and
transmission order for the next MSP. A certain eNB is enough t{1,2, ,T}.
since the action of each eNB is identical. Considering the cost c) Set i = 1 and j =1.
of additional signaling, Delay Tolerance Factor (DT) and 2) Determine wsk in MCE, where wsk is defined as (17)
Fairness Penalty Factor (FP) are included to guarantee the for all k {1,2,,K}. Then, MCE informs eNBs of the
throughput and fairness among the streams. Such scheduling is results of resource allocation.
called Time-out-Based Scheduling Strategy (TBS) here. 3) eNBs receive the MCH Scheduling Information (MSI).
delayHoL 4) While j T or k = 0, k, in eNBs
(DT) DTk = (14) a) While i N
PDBk i. Find k *where it is defined as (19).
delayk , HoL = t Tk , HoL , (15) ii. Find the m* as (20) for a given k *, then the
1 selected packet is allocated to the pair i of RBs
(FP) FPk = . (16) in TTI j.
scheduled _ totalk
iii. Update k, k , according to (18),
received_totalk
iv. Update i = i+1.
where delayk,HoL is the period from the time spot Tk,HoL, i.e., b) Update j =j+1.
when the head of line (HOL) packets arrived at the queue, to c) Set i =1.
the current time spot t for the streaming k . PDBk is the Packet
5) The procedure of resource allocation is complete.
Delay Budget for video streaming k indicated by QCI.
 Since the interval time of scheduling is enlarged, our
scheme is suboptimum in the case of conventional scheduling
strategies at TTI-level. However, from the view of realization,
it ensures that one TTI is allocated to one stream. Moreover,
differing from the current semi-dynamic scheduling in LTE
system, QoS of packet delay, fairness and the frame weight
are considered in the long-term and short-term scheduling
respectively, to aim to approach the performances achieved by
the conventional strategies. Comparisons are shown in Sec. V.
V. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
For the purpose of comparisons, the current semi-dynamic
scheduling in LTE system is introduced, i.e., FIFO and FIX,
where transmission order is set to be FIX, and FIFO means
B. QoS of Packet Loss
The QoS performance of Packet Error Loss Rate (PELR) is
considered in this section. Fig. 3 shows a comparison in PELR.
Obviously, PELR increases as transmission capacity decreases.
For a given streaming scheduling strategy, slight gains could
be observed by FIFO when compared with CS, but the gap is
negligible. Overall, our scheme outperforms the current
scheme. Suppose that the constraint of PELR is 2% or 5%, our
scheme could save at least one MBSFN subframe in one radio
frame when compared with the current scheme. Similarly,
under the constraints of the same amount of radio resources,
the QoS performance improves significantly by our scheme.
1

that the packets arrived earlier in the queue are scheduled MEDF
earlier in eNB. In this section, our scheme (TBS and CS) is 0.9 PROPOSED
compared with (FIX and FIFO), as well as MEDF and MMC.

Spectrum Efficiency(bit/s/Hz)
CURRENT
The detailed parameters are listed in Table I [1] [18]. To 0.8
simplify our analysis, we assume that all the transmitted
packets are received correctly by the receivers.
0.7
In order to combat the effect of frame losses, the decoders
MEDF
employ the simple whole-frame error concealment technology, MMC
0.6
[19]. There are five video sequences of YUV QCIF (176144) CURRENT
(News, Claire, Container, Foreman and Highway) to evaluate FIX+CS
the performances [20]. H.264 JM encoder and decoder are 0.5 TBS+FIFO
used, Quantization Parameter (QP) is 20 and the frame rate is PROPOSED
30f/s. We assume that the GOP pattern is IPPPPPPPPPPP. 0.4
PDB is 200ms as TV programs of Live Sports in e-MBMS [3], 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Number of MBSFN Subframes in One Radio Frame
which are common to all the video sequences.
Figure 2. Comparison of Spectrum Efficiency

TABLE I. E-MBMS SIMULATION PARAMETERS SETTING

Parameters Setting 0.8

Transmission Bandwidth 5MHz MEDF
Total number of pairs of available RBs for 25 0.7 MMC
e-MBMS system (12 subcarriers/RB) CURRENT
Transmission Time Interval(subframe) 1ms 0.6 FIX+CS
Packet Error Loss Rate

Radio Frame Duration 10ms CURRENT TBS+FIFO

MCH Scheduling Period 80ms2 0.5 PROPOSED
Total number of symbols per MBSFN subframe 6
Modulation and Coding Scheme 16QAM 1/2 0.4

A. Spectrum Efficiency 0.3

PROPOSED
Fig. 2 dedicates a relationship between spectrum efficiency 0.2
(SE) and the number of MBSFN subframes in one radio frame MEDF
with different solutions. When the total number of MBSFN 0.1
subframes is less than 5, the performances of SE are almost 0.05
0.02
the same. The reason is that the buffers in eNB keep almost 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
full under the limits of the number of MBSFN subframes, i.e., Number of MBSFN Subframes in One Radio Frame
the transmission capacity. With the increase of transmission
capacity, the gap of performance appears until it exceeds the Figure 3. Comparison of QoS of Packet Loss
achievable rate. MEDF outperforms MMC, because MMC
guarantees the transmission of I frames, while it causes larger
delay of the lower priority frames. Our proposed scheme C. Video Quality
outperforms current scheme (FIX+FIFO), the performance Video quality is accepted as another important metric of
even approaches to that of MEDF. The reason is that TBS performance for video transmission. We evaluate the results of
guarantees the delay constraint of such service, in order to Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) with different solutions in
improve the throughput. Meanwhile, larger delay of the Fig. 4. Obviously, MMC outperforms other solutions. As for
streams, which are always scheduled later in FIX, could cause our proposed scheme, significant improvements could be
more packets discarded due to expiration. observed compared with the current scheme. The reason is

2
MSP is configurable, eg.80~320ms, where it is associated with the scheduling
capability of eNB, such as cache capability and CPU processing capability [13]
In this paper, we assume the MSP is 80ms in simulations.
that the performance of PELR decreases by TBS compared
with FIX. Furthermore, CS ensures the prior transmissions of
I frames, which contribute more to PSNR. Consequently, the
performance of PSNR is improved by our scheme.
D. Fairness
Based on the fact that multiplexed streams are always with
the same QoS requirements, the performance of fairness
among the streams is considerable. The variance of PELR is
shown in Fig. 5. The results illustrate that the variance of
PELR of TBS is much smaller than that of DBS, no matter
what packet sorting strategy is used. TBS even obtains better
performance gains in fairness than MEDF. The reason is that
TBS utilizes the FP as the fairness constraint. The stream
where the fewer packets have been transmitted will be prior
scheduled, so as to balance the opportunities of transmission
among the streams.
40
38
36
MMC
PROPOSED
34
Average PSNR(dB)
for separate video streams in the bundle in e-MBMS system is
concerned. With practical considerations, a suboptimum QoS-
aware two-layer scheduling scheme is proposed towards LTE-
A system. It is divided into the streaming scheduling and
packet sorting by introducing dynamic QoS-related factors,
such as the packet urgency and fairness among the streams.
Streaming scheduling determines the transmission order of the
multi-streams in MCE. And then, packet sorting ensures the
transmissions of more important packets in eNB. Simulation
results show that significant gains could be observed by our
scheme in terms of the spectrum efficiency, packet loss, video
quality and the fairness among the streams when compared
with the current scheduling strategy.
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