SVM-D: Efficient SHVC Video Multicast through D2D Offloading over 5G Cellular Networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) offloading is an emerging technique in 5G where cache-enabled mobile devices receive data from a base station and distribute to the users within its D2D coverage. Storage capacity and battery energy limitation impose additional constraints in implementing such techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel D2D offloading scheme (SVM-D) for multicast transmissions of Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) videos in 5G multimedia mobile wireless networks. Instead of selecting a single cluster head, SVM-D selects multiple users for caching and forwarding scalable video content to the cluster members. A hybrid approach has been adopted for selecting a subset of users as the potential D2D transmitters (cluster heads) depending on their device category, channel quality, and available battery energy. The objective is to reduce the resource utilization at BSs and to increase the cluster lifetime while providing sufficient quality of experience (QoE) to the users. The local servers (i.e., mobile edge computing servers) perform an on-demand SHVC encoding of multimedia content and distribute it to the users via base stations. We evaluate the performance of SVM-D in terms of its overall resource utilization, average battery lifetime, and average QoE of the cluster users. The comparison is made with conventional unicast and multicast schemes in 5G network with and without D2D offloading scheme (where a single cluster head stores and forwards the data). Simulation results show that SVM-D out performs other popular existing schemes from the literature.