This application claims the benefit, under 35 U.S.C. §119 of EP Patent Application 08305333.0, filed Jun. 26, 2008.
The present invention relates to wireless communication, and more particularly, relates to a method and an apparatus for reporting state information of a receiver device.
The IEEE 802.16 standard specifies a fixed and mobile Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) standard for a wireless Metropolitan Area Network (MAN). The IEEE 802.16 standard defines different physical layer technologies for different frequency bands.
In current communication systems, multicast and broadcast techniques are employed for transmitting data from one source to multiple destinations. In order to effectively utilize radio resources, the IEEE 802.16e standard has introduced the Multicast and Broadcast Service (MBS) that standardizes the point to multi-point transmission in the mobile network. The MBS service may support not only the multicast and broadcast of low bit-rate message services such as text, but also the multicast and broadcast of high bit-rate multimedia services.
Layered coding is a data representation technique in which the source data is partitioned into multiple layers. The layers are organized normally in a way that the lowest layer also called base layer contains the minimum information for intelligibility; the other layers also called enhancement layers contain additional information that incrementally improves the overall quality of the source data. When the layered coding technique is applied in a video codec, the video data is normally encoded into multiple layers including a base layer of comparatively low quality video and at least one enhancement layer of increasingly higher quality video. At the receiver side of a layered coding communication system, a decoder can be configured to choose to decode a particular subset of these layers to get a particular quality of the video according to its preference and decoding capability.
Adaptive MCS (Modulation and Coding Scheme) is a key feature for WiMAX technology, wherein a higher level of MCS is employed in the area of good Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR); on the contrary, in the area of poor SNR, a relatively lower level of MCS is employed to guarantee the connection quality and link stability. In the MCS supported by the WiMAX, there are three categories of modulation types: QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying), 16QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and 64QAM.
To implement the adaptive MCS, one of important requirements is to acquire accurate feedback report of channel quality from the Mobile Stations (MS). Two kinds of mechanisms are defined in the standard for the MS to report the DL (Download Link) CINR (Carrier to Interference and Noise Ratio) value to the Base Station (BS):
The reporting messages sent by the MSs will cause a certain amount of signaling overhead as a function of the frequency of the polling and the total number of subscribers. Therefore, it is desirable to provide a method for reporting state information with a smaller signaling overhead.
According to an aspect of present invention, it provides a method for reporting state information of a receiver device in a multicast or broadcast network. The method comprises the steps of: receiving a service, which is encoded in at least two layers over a communication channel, through a subset of said at least two layers; measuring a channel quality parameter (202); and in response to the channel quality parameter reaching a predetermined threshold value, receiving said service through a modified subset of said at least two layers as a function of said measured channel quality parameter and transmitting state information of the receiver device (203).
According to an aspect of the present invention, it provides a receiver device for reporting state information while receiving a service that is encoded into at least two layers in a multicast or broadcast network. The device comprises a channel estimation module and a service management module. The channel estimation module configured to measure the channel quality parameter of downlink channel, over which a service encoded in at least two layers is received through a subset of said at least two layers; and the service management module configured to transmit state information of said receiver device when changing to receive said service through a modified subset of said at least two layers in response to the measured channel quality parameter reaching a predetermined threshold value.
According to an aspect of the present invention, it provides a device for resource allocation in a multicast or broadcast network in which a service is encoded into at least two layers over a communication channel. The device comprises a first module and a second module. The first module configured to receive state information from at least one receiver device that is receiving said service through a subset of said at least two layers, wherein the state information is transmitted by the receiver device when changing to receive said service through a modified subset of said at least two layers in response to a channel quality parameter measured by the receiver device reaches a predetermined threshold value; and the second module configured to adjust resource allocation of all services as a function of the received at least one receiver device's state information.
According to an aspect of the present invention, because only the MSs that satisfy the requirement of reception condition information send the report message, the signaling overhead is greatly reduced.
It is to be understood that both the foregoing general description and the following detailed description of the present invention are explanatory and exemplary only.
The accompanying drawings, which are included to provide a further understanding of the invention and are incorporated in and constitute a part of this application, illustrate embodiment of the invention together with the description which serves to explain the principle of the invention. Therefore, the invention is not limited to the embodiment. In the drawings:
The embodiment of the present invention will now be described in detail in conjunction with the drawings. In the following description, some detailed descriptions of known functions and configurations may be omitted for clarity and conciseness.
The embodiment is described in the context of a wireless network employing a layered coding technique. For an example, the documents IEEE Std 802.16e™-2005 and IEEE Std 802.16™-2004/Corl-2005 (Amendment and Corrigendum to IEEE Std 802.16-2004), available from IEEE, 3 Park Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016-5997, USA and published on 28 Feb. 2006 define certain aspects of such a wireless network. The embodiment described herein is placed in the frame of a network based on these documents, along with the changes indicated in the description. However, the invention should not be limited to the described network.
At the BS's side:
At the MS's side:
As an example, the table is derived based on the following steps: when an MS sends a dynamic service addition (DSA) request to the BS requesting to join an MBS service during the establishment of the connection in the MAC layer, the BS transmits the DSA response message containing reception condition information so that the MS can derive the reception condition information from the received DSA response message; and the MS stores the derived reception information in a table of a storage device, and maintains the table during the lifetime of the multicast service. Below is a sample table of a 3-layer MBS service:
As can be seen from the table 1, it contains the fields of layer type, CID (connection identifier) and effective reception CINR, records of which can all be derived from the DSA response message. The MBS service contains 3 layers, i.e. base layer, enhancement layer 1 and enhancement layer 2, with each layer associated with a CID and an effective reception CINR. The reception information contained in the sample table means that if the actual value of the current CINR reaches a threshold value of 5 dB, the MS is eligible to receive the data from the base layer of the requested MBS service; if the actual value of current CINR reaches another threshold value of 14 dB, the MS is eligible to additionally receive data from the enhancement layer 1; and when reaching the 20 dB, the MS is able to receive all data from base layer, enhancement layer 1 and enhancement layer 2. The CID here in the table is used to identify the different layers of an MBS service.
In one word, the reception condition information is used to indicate the conditions for triggering some actions, such as sending an indication message. As in the above table, the threshold values of CINR, i.e. 5 db, 14 db and 20 db, are the conditions for triggering the MS to send a message indicating the state change of the MS, i.e. joining or leaving a particular layer.
One example of a format of an indication message is shown below in table 2:
Management message type field: it is used to indicate the control message type so as to be compatible with the current standard.
Multicast CID field: it is used to indicate the identifier of the connection, which can also be used to uniquely identify a layer of an MBS service.
Type field: it is used to indicate whether the MS joins or leaves a layer that is identified by the value of the Multicast CID field.
The MBS_IND_ACK message is used by the BS to notify the MS of the acknowledgement of correctly receiving the MBS_IND message. It is known to one of the skilled in the art that the acknowledgement message is not always necessary under some circumstances.
Many methods can be employed to estimate the CINR value of the channel.
If the CINR estimation from the preamble is to be carried out, then the estimated CINR value shall be an estimate of the CINR over the subcarriers of the preamble.
If the CINR estimation on a specific permutation zone is to be carried out, then the estimated CINR value shall be the average CINR on non-boosted data subcarriers of the zone.
Another possible method for estimating the CINR value of a single message is to compute the ratio of the sum of the signal power and the sum of the residual error for each data sample, using the following function:
Wherein r[k,n] is the received sample n within the message measured at time index k in frame units, and s[k,n] is the detected or pilot sample n within the message measured at time index k in frame units.
The MS measures the channel quality parameter, for example the CINR value. And once the measured CINR value reaches a threshold value of the reception condition information, the MS will determine its current state information corresponding to the measured channel quality parameter and then send an indication message to the BS to report its state information, for example, the state change information of joining/leaving a particular layer.
According to the embodiment of the present invention, the signaling overhead is reduced because only the MSs satisfying the requirement of reception condition information send the report message. Furthermore, because the MS sends the report message right after it determines the channel quality satisfies one reception condition, the accuracy of the reporting mechanism is augmented.
Optionally, in addition to the above steps, based on the statistical information on all MBS services derived from the indication messages sent by MSs, the BS dynamically adjusts the resource allocation with a scheduling algorithm so as to increase the system's effectiveness.
To achieve overall efficient spectral utilization for the MBS service, the BS performs resource allocation among MBS services. The resource scheduling is done periodically and we assume that the transmit power across different sub-channels is fixed and does not change during service transmission. For the convenience of the reader, notations used below are shown in the table 3.
The satisfaction of an MS can be defined by the ratio of assigned bandwidth and expected bandwidth, denoting as sij=aij/eij. Assuming the mapping of the MCS mode for each layer is predefined in the BS and synchronized with each MS, the transmission of different layers respectively has different spectrum efficiencies. Thus we can define the utility ratio function for MS i in multicast group j as
which can reflect the combined consideration of channel spectrum efficiency and user satisfaction. The utility ratio for program j is the summation of the utility ratio values for all subscribers, i.e.
So, the system utility ratio
is defined as the total utility ratio value for all programs or MBS services. In order to increase the system utility ratio U, two factors need to be considered:
total bandwidth benchmark
(b) ∀j, λbj≧λmin, minimal guaranteed base layer.
The requirement of factor (b) can be met by reserving the minimal guaranteed bandwidth for each program, but utility ratio increment problem is NP-hard.
A greedy algorithm named dynamic exception satisfaction (DES) is proposed to carry out the resource allocation.
Firstly, the bandwidth for the base layer region is reserved for each program. Secondly, for enhancement layer, an order list will be created as a function of the number of subscribers at a given point in time: the most popular programs will be assigned more resources according to the following two approaches:
(a) Allow all enhancement layers for this program
(b) Allocate more resources for at least one enhancement layer
On the other hand, the less popular programs will be downgraded by releasing some enhancement layers or reducing bandwidth allocation.
Below is a pseudo-code for the algorithm.
Considering the requirement of factor (b), we first reserve the resources for the base layer of each video program or MBS service λmin in step 3, which is fixed modulated by QPSK1/2.
The following steps from 4 to 12 are used by the greedy algorithm to allocate the remaining bandwidth based on the program popularity indicated by the number of subscribers located in the region with effective reception capability for enhancement layers. At the beginning of each scheduling processing, the statistic value of the subscriber distribution of each program is calculated in step 4. Then the bandwidth is allocated in the order of the enhancement layers, in each scheduling round, a program is served according to the increasing popularity. Those programs with more subscribers capable of receiving an enhancement layer will go into upgrade processing by adding an enhancement layer or increasing resources until λmax is reached (step 8). On the contrary, the bottom programs with fewer receivers should release resources by decreasing the data rate to λmin. If for a layer λmin=0, this layer will be removed. For a normal program, λjl can be set to a value between the boundaries λmin and λmax, e.g. the bandwidth can be divided by a mean value or by using a proportioned fairness algorithm (in step 10). Considering the dependence among layers, if one layer is removed, the consecutive higher layers will also be eliminated. The iteration is done among video programs until the total available bandwidth is used up or all programs have already been served (step 7).
The DES algorithm can run in polynomial time. The complexity has two components, the first one being the sorting of popularity, which can be bound by O(P*lg(P)), where P is the number of multicast programs. The second one is the bandwidth allocation in each layer, the complexity of which can be bound by O(P*L). Therefore the complexity is O(P*lg(P))+O(P*L). Generally speaking, the number of programs in a system is a finite value, and a constant boundary E can be found for lg(P), lg(P)<E, thus the proposed algorithm can be run in polynomial time so as to improve the system's effectiveness.
According to a variant of the present embodiment, the reception condition information is not transmitted during the connection establishment, but transmitted in a dedicated message after the establishment of connection.
According to a variant of the present embodiment, the table is periodically updated by the MS through the signal communication between the MS and the BS after the table is initially generated by the MS.
According to a variant of the present embodiment, the conditions for triggering the action of reporting may take into account the configuration of an MS. For example, some MS would like to improve video quality by subscribing to more layers, other mobile hosts may take into account power consumption or decoding capability and thereby subscribe to a limited number of layers.
According to a variant of the present embodiment, the message reported is not limited to the message indicative of joining/leaving a particular layer. One of ordinary skill in the pertinent arts will appreciate that other kinds of messages can be used to indicate the state information of the MS.
According to a variant of the present embodiment, a man skilled in the relevant art will appreciate that the MS can measure two or more channel quality parameters for more precise control. For example, besides the CINR, the variation downgrade/upgrade slope can be used as a criterion for triggering the action of reporting. Correspondingly, the reception condition information should comprise these corresponding two or more channel quality parameters.
According to a variant of the present embodiment, the reception condition information just contains the fields of effective reception CINR and an identifier that can uniquely identify a layer. And in the report message there is a field indicating the action to the layer, e.g. joining or leaving a layer.
A number of implementations have been described. Nevertheless, it will be understood that various modifications may be made. For example, elements of different implementations may be combined, supplemented, modified, or removed to produce other implementations. Additionally, one of ordinary skill will understand that other structures and processes may be substituted for those disclosed and the resulting implementations will perform at least substantially the same function(s), in at least substantially the same way(s), to achieve at least substantially the same result(s) as the implementations disclosed. Accordingly, these and other implementations are contemplated by this application and are within the scope of the invention.
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