Statistical QoS provisionings for wireless unicast/multicast of layered video streams

Due to the highly-varying wireless channels, deterministic quality of service (QoS) is usually difficult to guarantee for real-time multi-layer video transmissions in wireless networks. Consequently, statistical QoS guarantees have become an important alternative in supporting real-time video transmissions. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework to model the statistical delay QoS guarantees, in terms of QoS exponent, effective bandwidth/capacity, and delay-bound violation probability, for multi-layer video transmission over wireless fading channels. In particular, a separate queue is maintained for each video layer, and the same delay bound and corresponding violation probability threshold are set up for all layers. Applying the effective bandwidth/capacity analyses on the incoming video stream, we obtain a set of QoS exponents for all video layers to effectively characterize this delay QoS requirement. We then develop a set of optimal adaptive transmission schemes to minimize the resource consumption while fulfilling the diverse QoS requirements under various scenarios, including video unicast/multicast with and/or without loss tolerance. Simulation results are also presented to demonstrate the impact of statistical QoS provisionings on resource allocations of our proposed adaptive transmission schemes.