H.

264 MGS CODING-BASED IPTV SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE OVER WIMAX NETWORK Hyunchul Joo and Hwangjun Song
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, POSTECH San 31, Hyoja-dong, Nam-gu, Pohang, Korea Email: {chul1978, hwangjun}@postech.ac.kr ABSTRACT In this work, we present an effective IPTV system architecture over WiMAX network. Basically, H.264 MGS coding is employed to adaptively transmit IPTV stream over the time-varying wireless environment. The proposed system is designed to provide an enhanced mobile IPTV service to as many subscribers as possible considering their wireless link states. To achieve this goal, the base layer stream is transmitted with the sparsest modulation scheme and the lowest coding rate to provide IPTV service of minimum quality to all subscribers in the cell. And some parts of the enhancement layer stream are transmitted with the modulation scheme and the coding rate selected to pursue an effective tradeoff between the number of subscribers that receive the enhancement layer stream and their IPTV service quality. Finally, experimental results are provided to show the performance of the proposed system. Keywords Mobile IPTV, Media Broadcasting, H.264 Medium-Grain Scalability Coding, WiMAX Network 1. INTRODUCTION IPTV (Internet Protocol TeleVision) is expected to be a killer application in the next generation Internet and provide new revenue opportunities for service providers by drawing new subscribers and increasing the average revenue per subscriber. [1] In the near future, IPTV service will be extended to the wireless network to provide IPTV service regardless of the subscriber location, which is called mobile IPTV [2]. WiMAX (Worldwide interoperability for Microwave Access) network [3] is considered one of the strongest candidates to support mobile IPTV service. It is an emerging wireless access network standard in the wide
This research is supported by the MKE (The Ministry of Knowledge Economy), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program supervised by the NIPA (National IT Industry Promotion Agency) (NIPA-2010(C1090-1011-0004)) and is one of results from the project (2009F-050-01), Development of the core technology and virtualized programmable platform for Future Internet that is sponsored by MKE and KCC.

coverage area that provides high data rates and differentiated services according to individual QoS (Quality of Service) requirements. And, MBS (Multicast and Broadcast Service) [4] of WiMAX network is very useful for media broadcasting applications due to using same transmission bandwidth regardless of the number of subscribers. Although WiMAX network provides high data rates in the wireless environment, it is still poor compared to the wired networks. Thus, mobile IPTV system must be designed to effectively manage the resource usage of IPTV channel streams and to minimize the video quality degradation over WiMAX network. So far, many research efforts have been devoted to determine how to efficiently support mobile IPTV service over WiMAX network. Some efficient algorithms have been proposed in the literature [5, 6, 7]. In this work, we propose an effective IPTV system architecture over WiMAX network. H.264 MGS (MediumGrain Scalability) coding is employed to increase the adaptability of the video stream over the time-varying wireless environment. One of the unique features of the proposed system is to dynamically control the modulation scheme and the coding rate for the enhancement layer considering the wireless link states of subscribers in order to pursue a tradeoff between the number of subscribers receiving the enhancement layer stream and their IPTV service quality. 2. REVIEW OF WIMAX NETWORK WiMAX network is an emerging standard for wireless access technology that provides high data rates and QoS over a wide area. WiMAX network supports several transmission modes at physical layer, i.e. SC (Single Carrier) mode, OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) mode, and OFDMA (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access) mode. In OFDM system, FEC coding is applied to the transmitted data stream for error resilience. Then a resulting data stream is divided into multiple parallel low rate data streams. Each low rate data stream is mapped to an individual data subcarrier and modulated using some sort of PSK (Phase Shift Keying) or QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation). Subcarriers are distributed into several groups, which are called sub-

978-1-4244-7493-6/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

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channels. Sub-channels may be configured by using contiguous subcarriers or pseudo-randomly distributed subcarriers over the frequency spectrum. Sub-channels formed by using pseudo-randomly distributed subcarriers provide improved frequency diversity and are particularly useful for mobile applications. MAC of WiMAX network is operated in a centrally controlled manner, i.e. the resource allocation is dynamically managed by BS (Base Station). For example, in OFDMA frame structure in TDD (Time Division Duplex) implementation, the medium is divided into continuous MAC frames in time and sub-channels. Each MAC frame is configured by DL (DownLink) and UL (UpLink) subframes. At the beginning of each MAC frame, BS transmits DL Map and UL Map into DL sub-frame. These maps provide resource allocation and other control information for DL and UL sub-frames, respectively. In each frame, TTG (Tx/Rx Transmission Gap) and RTG (Rx/Tx Transmission Gap) are inserted between DL and UL subframes, which are time gaps between transmission and reception. The minimum resource allocation unit is called a slot, which is configured by one sub-channel over one, two, or three OFDM symbols depending on the subcarrier permutation scheme. A burst is a contiguous series of slots assigned to a given subscriber and different MCS (Modulation and Coding Scheme) can be applied to it. Transmission rate on the slot is dependent on associated MCS and a tradeoff exists between link robustness and throughput. In other words, BER (Bit Error Rate) performance which suffers from fading and shadowing in wireless channels is improved at the cost of bandwidth efficiency, as the modulation scheme becomes sparser and the coding rate lower. In contrast, the denser modulation scheme and the higher coding rate provide higher data rates on the slot and increase sensibility against the wireless channel error.

system is to provide IPTV service of better quality to more subscribers. To achieve this goal, BS controls the incoming IPTV multicast streams according to the wireless link states of subscribers and sends them through MBS zone. 3.1. H.264 MGS Coding-based IPTV Stream To enhance adaptability, H.264 MGS coding scheme [8] is adopted as a component. It supports the flexible adaptation of video quality under bandwidth fluctuation by using a hierarchical layer structure. In the following, every IPTV channel stream is assumed to be encoded in two streams, i.e. BL (Base Layer) and EL (Enhancement Layer) stream. BL stream includes the information required for displaying the minimum quality video, and EL stream allows some loss of quality refinement packets but it cannot be used alone. When some parts of EL stream are available together with BL stream, subscribers are able to watch better quality video by combining both of them. In the proposed system architecture, H.264 MGS coding scheme is applied to each GOP (Group of Pictures) at IPTV headend. BL stream is encoded at a fixed bit-rate and transmitted by using the sparsest modulation scheme and the lowest coding rate at PHY layer to provide IPTV service of minimum quality to as many subscribers as possible. On the other hand, some parts of EL stream are transmitted from BS according to the selected MCS. In the engineering sense, more subscribers receive smaller parts of EL stream since the sparse modulation scheme and the low coding rate are selected to guarantee a stable wireless link to subscribers far away from BS. On the other hand, fewer subscribers receive larger parts of EL stream when the dense modulation scheme and the high coding rate are chosen. Thus, we pursue an effective tradeoff between the number of accommodating subscribers and the video quality of IPTV channel. 3.2. Problem Description Before presenting a detailed description, we make the following assumptions: (1) The proposed mobile IPTV system adopts DL PUSC (Down Link Partial Usage of SubCarrier), which is one of the subcarrier permutation schemes in DL sub-frame. DL PUSC is mandatory for all WiMAX network implementations and each slot consists of 24 data subcarriers by two OFDM symbols. (2) It is assumed that BS knows the wireless link state of each subscriber by using CQI (Channel Quality Indicator) in UL sub-frame. (3) For the IPTV stream transmission, the maximum amount of available slots per GOP interval is limited to SLOTMAX in order to avoid QoS degradation of other non-IPTV traffic. (4) H.264 MGS video coding scheme and slot allocation for IPTV channel stream are processed based on a GOP unit,

MBS

Fig. 1. Mobile IPTV system architecture.

3. PROPOSED MOBILE IPTV SYSTEM Mobile IPTV system architecture under our consideration is shown in Figure 1. It is assumed that IPTV headend receives IPTV channel streams from terrestrial, cable, and satellite broadcasting systems, and then transmits them to WiMAX BS in IP multicasting manner. The goal of the proposed

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and same MCS is applied during GOP interval in the proposed system.
Table 1. Modulation scheme and coding rate corresponding to mc

B + Roverhead ( BBL ) BTr _ EL + Roverhead BTr _ EL subject to BL + Bslot ( mcBL ) Bslot ( mcEL )

) SLOT

MAX ,

(3)

mc 1 2 3 4 5 6 ( MC Max )

MCS

64QAM, 3/4 64QAM, 2/3 16QAM, 3/4 16QAM, 1/2 QPSK, 3/4 QPSK, 1/2

Bslot (mc ) 216 192 144 96 72

48

where is a weighting factor between two terms ( 0 1 ), x means the smallest integer larger than x , Roverhead ( R ) is the additional overhead bits at MAC layer such as MAC header and CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) to transmit the R -bits of the upper layer, mcBL is mc value for the BL stream transmission, BBL and BEL are the amount of bits of BL and EL stream to be injected at MAC layer during GOP interval respectively, BTr _ EL is the amount of the transmitted bits truncated from BEL , and PSNR ( R ) is the estimated PSNR value when the amount of bit rates for a GOP is R . In this work, PSNR( R) is approximated by (4) PSNR ( R ) = m1R + m2 , where m1 and m2 are model parameters. The first term of Eq. 2 means how many subscribers can receive EL stream in the cell and the second term denotes how much the video quality is improved compared to only BL stream transmission. The first term is inverse proportional to the second one. is determined by the network manager considering the wireless link states of subscribers. If the majority of subscribers is closely located around BS and thus maintains good wireless link states, then a smaller is generally desirable. Eq. 3 takes into account the slot constraint for an IPTV channel stream.

The supportable combination of modulation scheme and coding rate over WiMAX network is denoted by mc , which ranges from one to MCMax in ascending order according to the robustness against the wireless channel errors as shown in Table I. Bslot ( mc) is the amount of the transmitted data bits per slot according to mc , which is calculated by (1) Bslot (mc) = 24 * 2* M (mc) * C (mc) , where M (mc) and C (mc) are the number of bits per symbol and the coding rate according to mc , respectively. M (mc) depends on the selected modulation scheme, e.g. M (mc) values of QPSK, 16QAM, and 64 QAM are two, four, and JJJ G six, respectively. Now, mc , MCS vector of subscribers, is defined by JJJ G mc = ( mc1, mc2 ,", mcN ) , where N is the total number of subscribers in the cell and mci is the lowest value of possible mc values for the ith subscriber according to the measured CINR (Carrier to Interference and Noise Ratio) or RSSI (Received Signal G JJJ G Strength Indication) value. And s ( mc, mcEL ) represents whether subscribers can successfully receive all transmitted EL stream to enhance video quality when mcEL , mc value for the EL stream transmission during GOP interval, is G JJJ G selected. Now, s ( mc, mcEL ) is characterized by
G JJJ G s mc, mcEL = ( s1 ( mc1, mcEL ) , s2 ( mc2 , mcEL ) ,", s N ( mc N , mcEL ) ) ,

1 si ( mci , mcEL ) = 0

if mci mcEL , otherwise.

Fig. 2. Main operation of BS.

As mentioned earlier, we consider not only the number of subscribers to receive EL stream, but also their video quality while satisfying the slot limitation. Now, we can formulate our problem as follows. Problem Formulation: Determine mcEL and BTr _ EL to maximize

3.3. Determining Process of mc EL and BTr _ EL Figure 2 represents the main function of BS. First of all, upper layer traffic is sorted into IPTV (BL and EL stream) and non-IPTV flows by the classifier component. MCID (Multicast Connection ID) and independent buffer are allocated to each IPTV channel multicast stream. Based on JJJ G the given mc , IPTV resource manager entity determines mcEL and BTr _ EL to maximize Eq. 2 while satisfying the

s ( mc , mc
i i i =1

EL

PSNR( BBL + BTr _ EL ) PSNR ( BBL ) + (1 ) , (2) PSNR( BBL + BEL ) PSNR ( BBL )

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slot constraint. The scheduler component reserves MBS zones in DL sub-frames for BBL and BTr _ EL transmission, and transmits them through the physical module entity. And, the rest of EL stream ( BEL BTr _ EL ) is removed at the corresponding buffer. Subscribers periodically report their wireless link states to IPTV resource manager through CQI JJJ G in UL sub-frame. mc is updated based on this CQI information. To determine mcEL and BTr _ EL , the full search-based algorithm can be employed to find optimal solution needs a considerable amount of the computation complexity,
O ( MCMax )

4. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS During the experiment, OPNET [9] and H.264 JSVM (Joint Scalable Video Model) 9.16 software [10] are employed. The network topology under consideration is given in Figure 1. It is assumed that throughput from IPTV headend to BS is 1Gbps and IP multicasting is supported over the wired network. The total number of subscribers is 20 in the cell and three cases of subscribers distribution are tested, i.e. Case 1 (majority of subscribers is far away from BS), Case 2 (majority of subscribers is close to BS), and Case 3 (subscribers are uniformly located in the cell). Each IPTV channel stream is encoded at 30 frames per second and a GOP consists of 16 frames. Target bit-rate for BL and EL stream are set to 117760 and 235520 bits during GOP interval respectively, and RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) packetization is employed to deliver BL and EL stream over the Internet. In other words, BL and EL stream periodically generate 10 and 20 RTP packets during GOP interval, respectively. Roverhead ( R) is R / 150 bits, and BBL and BEL are 120 and 240 kbits during GOP interval, respectively. SLOTMAX is fixed at 3700 slots during GOP interval. Modulation scheme and coding rate parameters are set as shown in Table I. mcBL is fixed at 6 (QPSK, 1/2). During the experiment, a fixed suburban (Erceg) model [11] is employed with a conservative terrain model which accounted for hilly terrain with moderate-to-heavy tree densities. OFDMA parameters for the experiment are set as shown in Table II. The proposed full search-based algorithm and fast algorithm provide the same optimal solution. However, the fast algorithm needs a much smaller computational complexity than the full search-based algorithm, i.e. the observed CPU time of the full search-based algorithm and the proposed fast algorithm are 95.9, and 0.3 milliseconds, respectively. Thus, the proposed fast algorithm is used in the following experiments.
Table 2. OFDMA simulation parameters

( mc

* * EL , BTr _ EL

) . However, the full search-based algorithm

BEL

).

Property 1: Based on the information theory, we can provide better video quality with a larger amount of bits: larger BTr _ EL can support better video quality. Thus,
* BTr _ EL ( mcEL ) is set to the maximum value among possible

BTr _ EL values that satisfy the slot constraint with the given
mcEL , i.e.
* BTr _ EL ( mcEL ) = arg min P ( mcEL , r ) for 0 r BEL , r

(5)

Slotresidue ( mcEL , r ) if Slotresidue ( mcEL , r ) 0, where P ( mcEL , r ) = otherwise,

B + Roverhead ( BBL ) r + Roverhead ( r ) Slotresidue ( mcEL , r ) = SLOTMAX BL . Bslot ( mcBL ) Bslot ( mcEL )
j j i i * * Property 2: If mcEL > mcEL , BTr _ EL mcEL < BTr _ EL mcEL .

Now, Eq. 5 can be represented by

j j i * * BTr _ EL mcEL = arg min P mcEL , r for BTr _ EL mcEL < r BEL . (6) r

To reduce computational complexity, we consider a fast algorithm that provides the same optimal solution as the full search-based algorithm. Compared to the full search-based algorithm, the fast algorithm eliminates the searching range by using the above properties and the required computational complexity is reduced to O( BEL ) . In the following, we present the proposed fast algorithm.
* Step 1: Search BTr _ EL ( mcEL ) values for 1 mcEL MCMax by Eq. 6. * Step 2: Now, the optimal solution is the pair mc* EL , BTr _ EL

to maximize the above gain function Eq. 2, i.e.

Parameter Channel bandwidth (MHz) FFT size Cyclic prefix or Guard time Oversampling rate Subcarrier frequency spacing (kHz) OFDM symbol duration (us) Number of OFDM symbols in 5 ms frame UL/DL boundary

Value 20 2048-FFT PUSC 1/8 28/25 10.94 102.86

48 1:3

( mc

* * EL , BTr _ EL

)=

arg max * ( mcEL , BTr _ EL ( mcEL ))

s ( mc , mc
i i i =1

EL

)/ N +

4.1. Performance of Proposed Algorithm according to In this section, we examine the performance of the proposed algorithm by adjusting the weighting factor between two terms for Eq. 2. Results are presented in Table III and

* PSNR ( BBL + BTr _ EL ( mcEL )) PSNR ( BBL ) . (1 ) PSNR ( BBL + BEL ) PSNR ( BBL )

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Figure 3 as increases from 0 to 1. As becomes larger, the sparser modulation scheme and the lower coding rate are selected, and BTr _ EL is decreased. Thus the resulting
PSNR( BBL + BTr _ EL ) decreases while

subscribers in the cell. Experimental results have shown that the proposed system provides a simple and effective solution with a low complexity.
Table 3. Performance comparison according to subscribers distribution

s
i =1

increases. For

example, when is set to between 0.00 and 0.24 in Case 3, (64QAM, 3/4) are selected for the full EL stream transmission (240 kbits), and thus only 2 subscribers can watch the high quality video whose PSNR is 37.76 dB. On the other hand, when is changed to a value between 0.63 and 1.00, (QPSK, 1/2) are chosen for the transmission of small parts of EL stream (48 kbits), and thus 20 subscribers can watch the video whose PSNR is 34.88 dB. These results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve an effective tradeoff between the number of subscribers receiving higher quality video and the video quality of these subscribers by adjusting the weighting factor. 4.2. Performance Comparison according to Subscriber Mobility In this section, we consider the subscriber mobility factor to demonstrate properties of the proposed system. During the experiment, subscribers are moving [0, 5 meters/second] by a random-way point model. Figure 4 (a) and (b) represent the time-varying wireless link state and the statistics of the received EL packets of a subscriber in the cell, respectively. As shown in figures, reception of the transmitted EL stream packets depends on the mc value of a subscriber, i.e. when the mc value of a subscriber is smaller than or equal to mcEL , the corresponding subscriber can successfully receive the transmitted EL stream packets. On the other hand, a subscriber with a mc value larger than mcEL has not received any packets of EL stream. Furthermore, BTr _ EL is related to . As becomes smaller, more EL stream packets are available at a subscriber but the curve of the received packets highly fluctuates as shown in Figure 4 (b). These figures show that the proposed system can dynamically control the subscribers reception and the amount of the transmitted EL stream by adjusting the weighting factor. 5. CONCLUSIONS In this work, we have proposed H.264 MGS coding-based IPTV transmission system to support improved IPTV service to more subscribers over WiMAX network. The proposed system has pursued an effective tradeoff between the number of subscribers watching IPTV of high quality and their video quality while satisfying the slot constraint. We can control the number of subscribers watching high quality IPTV and the video quality by adjusting the weighting factor according to the wireless link states of the

Subscribers distribution Case 1 distribution

0.00 ~ 0.45 0.46 ~ 1.00 0.00 ~ 0.18 0.19 ~ 0.82 0.83 ~ 1.00 0.00 ~ 0.24 0.25 ~ 0.39 0.40 ~ 0.62 0.63 ~ 1.00

mc EL

BTr _ EL

Case 2 distribution Case 3 distribution

64QAM, 3/4 QPSK, 1/2 64QAM, 3/4 64QAM, 2/3 QPSK, 1/2 64QAM, 3/4 64QAM, 2/3 16QAM, 3/4 QPSK, 1/2

240 kbits 48 kbits 240 kbits 216 kbits 48 kbits 240 kbits 216 kbits 168 kbits 48 kbits

(a)

(b) Fig. 3. Performance comparison according to : (a) the estimated PSNR value and (b) the total number of subscribers to receive EL stream.

(a)

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(b) Fig. 4. Time-varying link state of a subscriber and the corresponding number of the received EL packets during GOP interval at MAC layer: (a) the mc value of a subscriber and (b) the corresponding number of the received EL packets.

6. REFERENCES
[1] J. Y. Kim, J. H. Hahm, Y. S. Kim, and J. K. Choi, NGN Architecture for IPTV Service without Effect on Conversational Services, International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology, vol. 1, pp. 465469, Feb. 2006. [2] A. Harris and G. Ireland, Enabling IPTV: What carriers need to know to succeed, International Data Corporation, May 2005, White paper. [3] IEEE 802.16 TGe Working Document, (Draft Standard) Amendment for physical and medium access control layers for combined fixed and mobile operation in licensed bands, 802.16e/D4, Aug. 2004. [4] T. Jiang, W. Xiang, H. Chen, and Q. Ni, Multicast Broadcasting Services Support in OFDMA-Based WiMAX Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 45, no. 8, pp. 78-86, Aug. 2007. [5] J. She, F. Hou, P.H. Ho, and L. L. Xie, IPTV over WiMAX: Key Success Factors, Challenges, and Solutions, IEEE Communications Magazine, vol. 45, no. 8, pp. 87-93, Aug. 2007. [6] J. Wang, M. Venkatachalam, and Y. Fang, System Architecture and Cross-Layer Optimization of Video Broadcast over WiMAX, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 712-721, May. 2007. [7] H. S. Kim, H. M. Nam, J. Y. Jeong, S. H. Kim, and S. J. Ko, Measurement Based Channel-Adaptive Video Streaming for Mobile Devices over Mobile WiMAX, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 171-178, Feb. 2008. [8] H. Schwarz, D. Marpe, and T. Wiegand, Overview of the Scalable Video Coding Extension of the H.264/AVC Standard, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol.17, no. 9, pp. 11031120, Sep. 2007. [9] OPNET Modeler [Online]. Available: www.opnet.com. [10] Joint Scalable Video Model (JSVM) 9, Joint Video Team (JVT) of ISO/IEC and MPEG & ITU-T VCEG, N8751, Marrakech, Morocco, January 2007. [11] V. Erceg, L. J. Greenstein, S. Y. Tjandra, S. R. Parkoff, A. Gupta, B. Kulic, A. A. Julius, and R. Bianchi, An Empirically Based Path Loss Model for Wireless Channels in Suburban Environments, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 17, pp. 1205-1211, July. 1999.

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