Subcarrier allocation for variable bit rate video streams in wireless OFDM systems

Wireless OFDM systems have attractive means for adapting wireless transmission to a given situation: one possibility is to assign a varying number of subcarriers to wireless terminals for downlink communication. Deciding how many and which subcarriers to assign to a given terminal is a difficult problem. This paper concentrates on deciding how many: we use the relative length of a terminal’s queue in an access point to determine this number. Applying this scheme to the transmission of homogeneous MPEG-4 videos, we obtain a significant capacity increase compared to nonadaptive subcarrier allocation schemes.