Performance Evaluation and Parameter Optimization of SoftCast Wireless Video Broadcast

Wireless video broadcast plays an important role in multimedia communication with the emergence of mobile video applications. However, conventional video broadcast designs suffer from a cliff effect due to separated source and channel encoding. The newly proposed SoftCast scheme employs a cross-layer design, whose reconstructed video quality is proportional to the channel condition. In this paper, we provide the performance evaluation and the parameter optimization of the SoftCast system. Optimization principles on parameter selection are suggested to obtain a better video quality, occupy less bandwidth and/or utilize lower complexity. In addition, we compare SoftCast with H.264 in the LTE EPA scenario. The simulation results show that SoftCast provides a better performance in the scalability to channel conditions and the robustness to packet losses.