Cached And Segmented Video Download For Wireless Video Transmission
Ala’a Al-Habashna, Gabriel Wainer, Gary Boudreau, Ronald S. Casselman · 2016
The continuously increasing demands for higher data rates is a challenge for cellular networks service providers. In recent years, wireless video has been one of the main drivers of wireless data traffic, and this kind of traffic is going to continue growing. The LTE-Advanced standard (LTE-A) introduced new methods to cope with the increasing demands, but performance is still limited. New communication algorithms that exploit Device-to-Device (D2D) communication provide promising solutions to deal with these issues. In D2D, transmission between user equipments (UEs) takes place over direct links, without going through the Base-Stations (BS). Here, we introduce an algorithm for improving the throughput of video transmission in cellular networks called the Cached and Segmented Video Download (CSVD). The algorithm splits video files into pieces that are cached in selected UEs in the cellular network, and employs D2D communication between UEs to exchange files' pieces. We have built different models and simulated the CSVD algorithm with the Discrete EVent System Specification (DEVS) formalism. The models are used to study the improvements achieved by the CSVD in terms of the cell's aggregate data rate and the average data rate per user. Simulation results show that the CSVD achieves significant improvements over the conventional transmission approaches.