Novel radio resource allocation strategy for multimedia content delivery over satellite multicast/broadcast systems

The provisioning of multimedia applications requires wireless networks to optimally allocate radio resource and efficiently adapt to dynamically changing wireless environment. Radio Resource Allocation (RRA) strategy is an important issue in the design of the Satellite Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (SDMB) system, aiming at providing more efficient and cost-effective delivery of broadcast/multicast (BC/MC) services to a wide range of audience. Based on the single-level channel multiplexing framework, the existing RRA strategy only performs transport channel multiplexing and assumes one-to-one ideal mapping between logical and transport channels. However, the bit rates of the logical channels do not always exactly match those of the transport channels, and this leads to inefficient usage of radio resource. To solve this problem, in this paper, a novel RRA strategy, which is capable of optimally performing both logical and transport channel multiplexing, is proposed for the SDMB system. In order to improve the resource utilisation and reduce the power consumption, two new algorithms, namely Optimum Estimation Algorithm (OEA) and Power-Oriented Adaptation (POA) algorithm, are developed to optimize the proposed 2-level channel multiplexing scheme. In comparison with the existing single-level channel multiplexing scheme, simulation results show that the proposed 2-level channel multiplexing scheme achieves significantly better performance in terms of transport/physical channel utilisation, transmission power consumption as well as total transmission capacity.