Design and Analysis of a Wireless Switched Digital Video Scheme for Mobile TV Services over WiMAX Networks

Abstract

Mobile WiMAX is emerging as one of the most promising systems for 4th generation mobile wireless networks in which it is foreseen that mobile TV services will proliferate. In general, TV applications are bandwidth hogs that cause a challenging capacity problem in wireless networks. To address this challenge, a novel scheme for mobile TV services over WiMAX network, called the wireless switched digital video (WSDV) scheme, is proposed in this paper. Compared with the conventional broadcast or unicast schemes, the hybrid approach introduced in our proposed WSDV approach exploits the merits of two conventional schemes and mitigates their demerits, which enables it to increase wireless capacity for mobile TV services. In addition, we present a WiMAX design tool, based on an analytical model, which facilitates analysis of the influence of some system parameters on wireless capacity. The analytical model can capture the details of WiMAX resource allocation and take into consideration the popularity of the mobile TV contents being viewed by users-enabling it to provide an accurate estimate of the amount of bandwidth required for WiMAX TV services and also enabling a designer to optimally select the number of channels via the WSDV service while meeting a desired level of blocking probability. In addition, we demonstrate that our proposed optimized scheme outperforms the conventional schemes with respect to blocking probability. Finally, an end-to-end solution to the WSDV scheme is also presented.