QoE-Driven Cross-Layer Bitrate Allocation Approach for MEC-Supported Adaptive Video Streaming

The Software-Defined Mobile Network (SDMN), Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC), Cloud RAN (C-RAN), and Network Slicing are the promising solutions that have been defined for the next generation of the wireless mobile networks in order to fulfill the increasing Quality of Experience (QoE) demand of the mobile users and the Quality of Service (QoS) concerns of high-performance, innovative services. In today’s complex telecommunications network, coupled with continuous traffic growth, and users’ demand for higher speeds, it is vital for mobile operators to allocate their available resources efficiently. This paper focuses on the joint resource allocation problem of delivering adaptive video streams to users located in different slices of a wireless network enabled by MEC, SDMN, and C-RAN technologies. It proposes a novel Cross-Layer QoE-Driven Bitrate Allocation (CLQDBA) algorithm, that aims to improve system utilization by using information from the higher layers regarding traffic patterns and desired video quality of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) users. The mixed-integer nonlinear program is formulated, taking into account network slice requirements, radio resource limitations, storage and transcoding capacity of MEC servers, and users’ quality of experience. CLQDBA is a low complexity greedy-based algorithm aims to maximize users’ quality of experience (QoE) and minimize the deviation between the achievable throughput at the MAC-layer for users and the value of allocated bit rates for video frames at the application layer. The simulation result shows that compared to the baseline scheme, our introduced algorithm, on average, achieves a 15% higher system utilization, 17% higher video quality, and 13% improvement of Jain’s Fairness index for HAS users.