Enabling media streaming over LTE-U small cells

In an attempt to face the anticipated spectrum crunch and inspired by the possibility of extending LTE-A to the unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U), in this paper we devise an adaptive channel assignment scheme for video streaming over LTE-U small cells. The proposed scheme adaptively assigns video frames to a subset of monitored channels with the objective of reducing possible starvation instants at user equipments (UEs), and hence maintaining continuous video playback. Specifically, considering coexisting LTE-U small cells and Wi-Fi networks, and leveraging the carrier aggregation (CA) feature in LTE-A, our scheme takes into account the quality of monitored channels, the occupancy of the playback buffers at the UEs, the deadlines and priorities of transmitted video frames, as well as the activity of Wi-Fi users when optimizing the assignment of video frames to channels in the licensed and unlicensed spectrum. According to the numerical results, the proposed scheme returns higher utility, and hence higher probability of correctly receiving video frames, compared to traditional assignment schemes.