See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/261050983

Overhead analysis in WiMAX-based IPTV systems

Conference Paper · January 2011

Source: ieeexplore.ieee.org

CITATIONS READS
3 655

2 authors:

Alireza Abdollahpouri Bernd E. Wolfinger

University of Kurdistan University of Hamburg
38 PUBLICATIONS   323 CITATIONS    122 PUBLICATIONS   818 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

An ideal point based many-objective optimization for community detection of complex networks View project

Multicast gain View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Alireza Abdollahpouri on 06 April 2014.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Overhead Analysis in WiMAX-based IPTV Systems
Alireza Abdollahpouri1,2, Bernd E. Wolfinger1
1
Department of Computer Science - TKRN
University of Hamburg - Germany
2
University of Kurdistan - Sanandaj - Iran
Email: {Abdollahpouri, Wolfinger}@informatik.uni-hamburg.de

Abstract- Salient features supported by mobile WiMAX
including high data rate, multicast support, guaranteed quality of
service, scalability and so on makes it a promising access network
for IPTV delivery. A WiMAX frame consists of data bursts and
control fields. Control fields are encoded with the highest
modulation and coding scheme with four repetitions in order to
make sure that all the users can receive and decode them
successfully. Therefore, overhead for transmitting control
information has a significant impact on the overall capacity of the
frame. We show by both simulation and analytical methods that
with an appropriate combination of multicast and unicast TV
channels and a smart scheduling policy, the total number of
overhead slots can be minimized.
Keywords: IPTV; Mobile TV; Overhead analysis; WiMAX
I- INTRODUCTION
New generation which have grown up with Internet and
interactive gaming, are no longer satisfied with traditional
one-way broadcasting of TV programs. Internet Protocol TV
(IPTV) describes a mechanism for transporting TV streams
encapsulated in IP packets using networking protocols and
tries to offer more interactivity and more control over the
content. To provide ubiquitous delivery, IPTV service
providers have to pay special attention to wireless broadband
technologies as their access networks.
Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access
(WiMAX) technology which is based on IEEE 802.16 air-
interface standard provides a specific Quality of Service (QoS)
class for bandwidth-hungry and delay-sensitive applications
and therefore, it can be a leading solution to deliver IPTV
streams to fixed and mobile subscribers [1]. A WiMAX frame
composed of data information (data bursts) and control
information. The control information is considered to be the
overhead of the frame since it does not carry application data.
It has been argued for a long time that the popularity of TV
channels can be modeled quite realistically using a Zipf-like
distribution in which the top 10% of channels account for
nearly 80% of viewers [2]. Therefore, most channels are
unpopular or rarely watched and it is not efficient to multicast
a channel as long as there are less than a given number of
viewers tuned into it. Measures and calculation methods to
determine the gain (or loss) of multicasting versus unicasting
in IPTV transmissions have been proposed recently in [3] and
[4].
In [5] authors studied physical and MAC layers overhead as
well as header suppression and header compression in
WiMAX/IEEE 802.16 systems. They evaluated the effect of
header overhead on VoIP transmission. Y. Gao et al. in [6]
showed that overhead size changes according to varying user
number and number of burst profiles. They proposed a
dynamic overhead model for downlink and uplink and proved
that their proposed model can better evaluate the system
capacity using system level simulation. In order to reduce
MBS MAP overhead, E. Kim and N. Lee in [7] proposed an
efficient Multicast Broadcast Service (MBS) using bitmap
which is an indication intended for one or multiple MSs. In [8]
H. S. Kim and S. Yang proposed a further compressed MAP
called tiny MAP where redundant elements are removed
through small modifications of the standard.
None of the abovementioned articles considered the
combined unicast-multicast workloads in the MAP overhead
analysis which we will focus on. In this paper, a simulation-
based overhead analysis as well as an analytical method is
given for IPTV transmission in WiMAX-based access
networks. Taking advantage of the Zipf-like distribution of TV
channels popularity, we analyze a combined multicast-unicast
transmission in order to find the case in which minimum
number of overhead slots is required. We will show that with a
correct combination of multicast and unicast TV channels and
a proper scheduling policy, the overhead can be significantly
reduced.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows: In
Section II some background information about IPTV and
WiMAX is given. Section III presents an analysis on WiMAX
overhead for control information. We then present our
simulation and analytical methods in Section IV. The paper
continues with a case study and numerical results in Section
V, and ends with conclusions and future works in Section VI.
II- BACKGROUND
A.IPTV
IPTV is one of the fastest growing services so that the
number of worldwide IPTV subscribers will exceed 70 million
by 2015 [11]. This is partially due to the enormous
improvement of networking technologies and partially because
of the advances in media encoding and compression
techniques (e.g., H.264/AVC). When offered via wireless
technologies (e.g., WiMAX), IPTV can pave the way for
quad-play in next generation networks.

Fig.1 – IPTV system structure
Some special features of IPTV systems are:
o User-defined favorite channel list to facilitate and
accelerate channel switching.
o DVR (Digital Video Recording) capability which with
the aid of a local hard drive, allows a user to pause,
rewind, fast forward (not in live play), and record the TV
program being played. Some IPTV providers allow the
users to record one channel to DVR while watching
another live channel on TV.
o Advanced features such as Picture-In-Picture (PIP), on-
line gaming and chatting, targeted advertising and
personalized web services [12].
In general, IPTV services can be divided into two classes,
namely Video on Demand (VoD) for stored contents and
Broadband-TV (BTV) for live TV channels. Live TV service
is usually accompanied by an electronic program guide to
facilitate program selection. Unlike the native broadcast in
traditional TV systems, in IPTV, video streams are distributed
using IP unicast and multicast toward subscribers. Typically,
unicast is employed in the case of VoD and multicast is
employed by BTV service for the delivery of live TV channel
streams. Each individual TV channel is mapped into a
dynamic multicast stream with a unique multicast address.
When a user switches into a specific channel, the STB sends a
request to join the corresponding multicast stream using IGMP
protocol, and then if successful, the user can receive and start
to watch the required content after a short buffering and
decoding delay.
Fig. 1 depicts a typical IPTV system structure which
consists of the following five main parts: IPTV head-end, core
network, metro backbone, access network and customer
network. Interested readers can refer to [13] for a more
detailed description.
B. WiMAX
WiMAX is a broadband wireless access technology based on
IEEE 802.16 standard which defines physical and MAC layers
of the air interface. Mobile WiMAX utilizes the Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) where the
spectrum is divided into many subcarriers and different users
can be served simultaneously. MAC layer in WiMAX is
connection oriented and each connection is identified by a
unique 16-bit connection identifier (CID).
Bandwidth allocation in WiMAX frames consists of OFDMA
symbols in one dimension and frequency subchannels in the
other dimension. The smallest logical unit for bandwidth
allocation is called a slot. The definition of a slot depends on the
type of subcarrier permutation and varies for uplink and
downlink. For downlink Partial Usage of SubChannels (PUSC),
a data slot is composed of one subchannel (24 data subcarriers +
4 pilot subcarriers) and two OFDMA symbols [1]. For example,
the data region depicted by dotted line in Fig. 2, occupies five
slots. The number of bits inside a slot (slot capacity) is variable
and depends on the modulation and coding schemes used. For
instance, the capacity of one 64-QAM 3/4 slot is three times as
much as the capacity of one QPSK 3/4 slot (See Table I).
WiMAX in Time Division Duplex (TDD) mode can
dynamically adjust the downlink/uplink ratio to efficiently
manage the asymmetric demand for bandwidth. As shown in
Fig. 2, the TDD frame structure is divided into DL and UL sub-
frames separated by transition gaps to prevent DL and UL
transmission collisions. Typical frame duration is 5ms. In the
DL sub-frame, the preamble is used for synchronization; the
Frame Control Header (FCH) provides the frame configuration
information such as coding scheme, MAP message length and
usable sub-channels. The DL-MAP and UL-MAP provide sub-
channel allocation, the type of modulation and coding used by
the bursts containing the data information, in DL and UL
respectively, as well as other control information. In the UL
sub-frame the UL Ranging sub-channel is allocated for MS to
perform closed-loop time, frequency, and power adjustment as
well as bandwidth requests. In the figure, a combined multicast–
unicast in downlink subframe is shown.
The portion of the WiMAX data rate used for IPTV service
can be limited in such a manner that non-IPTV traffic does not
suffer too much from IPTV service. Also, thanks to the QoS
enabling (guaranteeing) mechanisms of WiMAX, we can easily
make sure that IPTV service is not negatively affected by
concurrent background traffic of different kind.
Fig.2 – WiMAX TDD frame structure
C. WiMAX Multicast Broadcast Service (MBS)
In unicast transmission, the resource requirement increases
proportionally with the number of users and therefore, it is not
an efficient approach in terms of bandwidth requirement. Based
on the useful features of similar technologies (namely MBMS,
DVB-H and MediaFLO), the IEEE 802.16e standard proposed
Multicast Broadcast Service (MBS). MBS provides an efficient
method for concurrent transmission of a common data (e.g., a
TV channel) to a group of users, using a common multicast
connection identifier (MCID). Multicast CIDs are in the range
0XFEA0 to 0XFEFE.
Using MBS, bandwidth requirement reduces from one
burst per viewer to one burst per TV channel. MBS is offered
in the downlink only. To manage overall operations of MBS,
an MBS controller (server), is needed in the system ( Fig. 1).
It is worth noting that MBS can not take advantage of
Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) because it must
fulfill the requirements of all the clients in the multicast group
(even those in the border of the cell with low SNR).
Meanwhile, ARQ can not be used in multicast sessions.
A service area composed of a set of WiMAX cells and
using the same MCID range is called an MBS zone. Each
MBS zone is identified by a unique number. MBS
transmission is synchronized among the BSs inside an MBS
zone to allow macro-diversity, reducing interference and
smoothing the hand-off.
The BS sends an MBS MAP message to specify the
location and size of MBS data bursts in the MBS region of the
downlink subframe. MBS MAP is located at the first
subchannel and the first OFDMA symbol of the MBS region
as illustrated in Fig. 2.
Similar to unicast services in IEEE 802.16, the MBS
service flows are managed through a DSx (Dynamic Service
Addition/Deletion/Change) messaging procedure used to
create, change, and delete a service flow for each MS.
An MBS zone with two cells (size 2) is depicted in the Fig
3. As shown in the figure, four TV users are in cell1 and five
others are in cell2. The numbers beside the circles indicate the
TV channel each user is already watching. The number of data
bursts (unicast and multicast) is equal to four and three in cell1
and cell2, respectively. Note that, although there is no active
user watching channel 2 in cell1, for the sake of synchronicity,
channel 2 is also multicasted in cell1. Here, channel 2 is called
an unused channel in cell1. OV1 and OV2 are overhead parts
in the downlink subframe and will be discussed and calculated
in the next section.
Fig.3 – Multicast and unicast in a 2-cell MBS zone
III- OVERHEAD ANALYSIS IN WIMAX FRAMES
There exist many studies on WiMAX capacity evaluation
but only a few of them consider the impact of overhead on the
system performance [6]-[10]. As mentioned in Section I, none
of the previous studies consider mixed multicast-unicast
workload. In the following, we want to investigate the
overhead slots for IPTV transmission in an MBS zone.
The overheads for control parts (Preamble, FCH, DL-MAP
and UL-MAP and MBS overhead) are encoded with QPSK
1/2 and four repetitions in order to enable all the mobile
stations to decode them correctly. Therefore, they have a
significant impact on overall capacity of the frame.
Each DL-MAP and UL-MAP is composed of a fixed part
and a variable part. The fixed part includes 104 and 64 bits for
DL-MAP and UL-MAP, respectively. In both DL-MAP and
UL-MAP, variable parts consist of one entry (MAP-IE) per
user burst. Therefore, the size of the MAP messages depends
on the number of bursts. For MBS transmission, the overhead
includes MBS-MAP-IE, MBS-MAP and MBS-DATA-IE [14].
In this paper we only concentrate on downlink subframe
and downlink overhead. Other than the preamble, the rest of
the control parts are transmitted in units of slots. The size of
the abovementioned fields are as follows:
⋅ FCH : 4 slots;
⋅ Fixed part of DL-MAP: 104 bits;
⋅ Fixed part of UL-MAP: 64 bits;
⋅ DL-MAP-IE: 60 bits for each entry (unicast burst);
⋅ UL-MAP-IE: 32 bits for each entry (unicast burst);
⋅ MBS-MAP-IE: 40 bits;
⋅ MBS-MAP: 28 bits ;
⋅ MBS DATA IE: 72 bits for each entry (multicast burst).
The number of overhead slots in the first part of the
overhead (in downlink subframe) for a specific cell is equal to:
104 + 64 + 60U + 40  (1)
OV1 = 4 +  ⋅r
 slot − size ( MCS 1 ) 
where
… denotes the ceiling function.
For the MBS region, overhead can be calculated from the
following formula:
 28 + 72M  (2)
OV2 =  ⋅r
 slot− size( MCS1 ) 
where, U is the number of unicast bursts, M is the number of
multicast bursts and r is the repetition factor.
Therefore, total downlink overhead is equal to:
OV= OV1 + OV2 (3)
The total number of available slots in a frame is fixed and the
overall radio resource is limited. Therefore, not all of the
combinations of multicast/unicast are feasible.
A solution is feasible if:
Available Slots ≥ Required slots (4)
If a portion α% of the bandwidth resource is reserved a priori
for IPTV, the total number of available slots is calculated as
follows:
Available Slots = α ⋅ (Total Slots - OV ) (5)
If AMC is used for unicast bursts, the slot requirement for
unicast served users depends on their SNR and therefore the
most suitable MCS for each user can be applied.
For MBS, the most robust MCS (lowest rate) is used. Required
slots can be calculated from the following formula:
Required slots =
U − Served
∑ Slots (User
i =1
i ,k ) + M ⋅ Slots ( MCastBurst )
Here, Slots(Useri,k) is the slot requirement for unicast-served
user i which uses MCSk, M as in (2) is the number of channels
transmitted by means of multicast, U-served is the number of
unicast-served users, and Slots(MCastBurst) is the slot
requirement for a multicast burst.
IV- SIMULATION AND ANALYTICAL METHODS
A. Evaluation based on simulation
To analyze the effect of overhead slots in the total capacity
of the WiMAX network, we developed a simulation tool based
on the C++ programming language. Note that, upper layer
overhead (RTP/UDP/IP) which is about 40 bytes can be
reduced to only 3 bytes using Payload Header Suppression
technique (PHS) and therefore will be neglected in the
simulation.
The simulation scenario is depicted in Fig. 4 which is
composed of seven WiMAX cells which make an MBS zone.
The MBS server handles the TV requests of IPTV users on
behalf of the IPTV head-end.
Fig.4 – Simulation scenario
Each WiMAX cell consists of a number of subscriber
stations served by a BS, which controls the access to the
wireless medium in a centralized manner. After establishing a
connection, the BS is then responsible for meeting the
requested QoS guarantees, scheduling the data and allocating
the required slots in the frame. The position of data bursts are
advertised by the BS via DL-MAP.
As mentioned previously, watching probability of TV
channels can be modeled quite realistically using a Zipf-like
distribution with the following formula:
−1
Ω  C 1 
pi = where Ω =  ∑ α  ; 0 < α ≤ 1; (7)
iα  j =1 j 
α is shaping parameter, Ω is scaling parameter, which can be
decided by α, and C is the number of TV channels. We assume
50 TV channels and α =1, then: Ω = 0.2222622.
The users can access the TV service (provided by the MBS
(6)
server) via the BS and send their request for the channels. A
user with a good signal condition can receive data at a higher
modulation (and thus, higher rate) compared to a user with a
poor link condition. Meanwhile, sending data at a higher
modulation consumes less resources (slots). In unicast mode,
different streams of this channel (with different rates) must be
transmitted. In multicast mode, the BS needs to choose an
MCS that has lower SNR requirement (and thus lower slot
capacity) to fulfill the requirements of all clients in the
multicast group. In this mode only one stream but with the
lowest rate (most robust MCS) is transmitted. Note that, if the
lowest rate MCS is not chosen, each user arrival and departure
may change the MCS of the multicast group and involves
signaling overhead and implies significantly more complexity.
We use seven MCS levels as shown in Table I.
The total number of N IPTV users are uniformly distributed
over WiMAX cells. After dropping the users, SNR is
calculated for each user in order to find the best MSC to
transfer the TV stream. Thereafter, each user selects a TV
channel from the set of channels which have zipf-like
distribution.
The number of TV channels being transmitted by means of
multicasting (M) varies from 1 to 50. Then, the number of
unicast served users is defined and overhead can be calculated
by means of (1) and (2). Fig. 5 illustrates the simulation
algorithm.
We use the following metrics to evaluate our simulation
scenario:
• Average number of unused multicast channels
• Average number of overhead slots
Fig. 5- Simulation algorithm
 For feasibility analysis and to calculate the number of
required slots, we need some assumption about the workload.
The mobile TV workload depends on the quality and the size
of the display screen. We assume that WiMAX subscribers use
PDA or mobile phones which have low display resolution and
small sizes. Display resolution directly affects bandwidth
requirement for TV streams. For example, for a TV program
in QCIF format (176×144) with 15 frames per second,
bandwidth requirement is about 128 Kbps. Due to the low
bandwidth requirement, currently available WiMAX data rates
are usable for providing a sufficiently large number of
different TV programs to the set of IPTV users being active in
a cell at the same time (who together will only rarely require
more than 20-30 TV programs in parallel at a given time,
corresponding to an aggregate data rate of still less than 4
Mbps).
Note that TV workload is highly asymmetric and almost all
of the traffic is going downlink. With the assumption of the
DL:UL ratio of 3:1 and number of 30 subchannels, the total
number of slots in the downlink is equal to 510 [15]. We
assume 70% of downlink transmission capacity is reserved for
IPTV (α=0.7). Having this information, the number of
available slots can be easily calculated for each
unicast/multicast combination.
Since the frame duration is 5 ms, 200 frames exist in a
second. If each user is scheduled to be served in every frame,
640 (128000/200) bits per frame are required for it in QCIF
format. For each MCS, the number of required slots per frame
for the TV stream is equal to:
Slots(Useri,k )=
640/slot_size(MCSk)
Slot requirement for MBS bursts can be calculated as follows:
Slots(MCastBurst )=
640/slot_size(MCS1)=14.
B. Evaluation based on analytical method
The main advantage of analytical methods are their
straight-forward applicability (as compared to simulations)
and their strongly simplified usage (e.g., to determine
performance or reliability measures of interest). The analytical
method proposed in the following is mainly based on the idea
that it is possible to determine the overhead to be expected
without knowing the exact location of users. Instead, for the
analytical method we make only use of expected number of
users being located in given areas, in which the received SNR
is similar. Since we assume that clients are uniformly
distributed in the area, the probability that a client is located in
a specific region is related to the area fraction of that region.
Assume Rk (k=1,…,7) is the maximum distance that signals
can be received using MCSk. With the assumption that
decreasing in the signal strength is only due to the free space
path loss, Rk can be calculated from the following formula:
Pt [ dBm ] + 10 log( G t ) + 10 log( G r ) − SNR [ dB ] − N [ dBm / Hz ]
λ ⋅ 10 20
Rk = ;
4π
(10)
where, Pt (43 dBm) is the transmission power, N (-174
dBm/Hz) is the thermal noise and Gt (16 dBi) and Gr (0 dBi)
are transmitter and receiver antenna gain, respectively [16].
Therefore, we can divide each cell into seven concentric
circles (with radius Rk) which represent seven different regions
in which users can receive signals modulated using different
(8) MSCs as shown in Fig. 6.
(9)

Table I- Parameters for different MCSs

MCS Required Bits per Slot size No. of
SNR (dB) Subcarrier (bits) required slots
per frame
MCS1: QPSK 1/2 5 1 48 14
MCS2: QPSK 3/4 8 1.5 72 9
MCS3: 16-QAM1/2 10.5 2 96 7
MCS4: 16-QAM3/4 14 3 144 5
MCS5: 64-QAM1/2 16 3 144 5
MCS6: 64-QAM2/3 18 4 192 4
MCS7: 64-QAM3/4 20 4.5 216 3
Fig.6 – Concentric circles to divide the cell in to different MCS regions
Main simulation parameters are summarized in Table II.
Let Ak be the area fraction of region MCSk which is
Table II- Simulation parameters
bounded by two concentric circles with radiuses Rk and Rk+1,
Parameter Value
respectively (A1 is highlighted in the Fig. 6 ). Then, Ak can be
Frame duration 5 ms calculated as follows:
OFDMA symbols per frame 48
Rk2 − Rk2+1 (11)
No. of available slots in DL-subframe 510 Ak = , R8 = 0
DL:UL ratio 3:1 R12
Percentage of bandwidth reserved for IPTV (α) 0.7
Consequently, the average bits per slot can be calculated as
Number of WiMAX cell in MBS zone 7 follows:
Video format QCIF(176×144)-15 fps 7

Bandwidth requirement for one stream 128 Kbps

Slot_size( average) = ∑ Ai ⋅ slot − size ( MCS i ) = 113bits (12)
i =1
Number of TV channels 50
 Total number of required slots is the sum of the slots
needed for unicast-served users and the slots needed to
transmit multicast bursts and the overhead slots. Calculation of
the overhead slots is similar to simulation method.
Therefore, the total number of required slots is equal to:
 640  (13)
Required slots = U ⋅  + M ⋅14 + OV
 113 
Considering the delay requirements of a given workload, a
smarter scheduler can try to reduce the number of bursts in a
frame in order to minimize the MAP overhead. In other words,
the scheduler can use less frequent but bigger allocations to
reduce the size of the variable part of DL-MAP. For example, if
we assume maximum tolerable delay of 20 msec for IPTV
users, we can divide the IPTV users to four groups (5 msec
frame duration) and schedule each group every 4th frames. This
that with the increment of number of IPTV clients inside the
cell, the number of unused multicast channels decreases;
because then it is more probable that two or more clients
watch the same channel simultaneously.
Comparing Figures 7 and 8 leads us to a fact that there is a
tradeoff between overhead and number of unused multicast
channels. In particular this means that, the more users in the
network, the higher overhead and the lower number of unused
multicast channels.
350
300
250

Overhead (slots)
technique does not change the size of data (80 bytes every 200
frame changes to 320 bytes every four frames), but only the
control overhead. 150
35 users

70 users

105 users
100
V- CASE STUDY 140 users

175 users
50
In this section we want to discuss some numerical results 210 users

based on our simulation scenario and analytical formulae. 0

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50

No. of channels being multicasted

A. Overhead slots
Fig. 7 -Average number of overhead slots
To evaluate the total number of overhead slots, the number (95% confidence intervals)
of multicast channels (M) varies from one to 50 and the
simulation is repeated for different number of IPTV users in 50

MBS zone (from 5 to 30 users per cell). Overhead slots are

Average number of unused multicast channels

35 users
calculated according to (1) and (2). When the total number of
40
users is higher than 105, the overhead slightly decreases until 70 users

multicasting about four most popular channels (M=4) and then 105 users

140 users
rises steadily. As can be seen in Fig. 7, this increment after 30
175 users
decrement makes U-shaped curves. The U-shaped diagram is
210 users
clearer for the cases when a larger number of IPTV users exist
20
in the network.
When the total number of users is less than 70 only the first TV
channel must be multicasted in order to minimize the overhead. 10
For the case of about 210 users, multicasting 4 to 6 most
popular channels, can lead to minimum overhead. The curves of
Fig. 7 are obtained using the simulation method. 0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 42 44 46 48 50

No. of channels being multicasted

B. Unused multicast channels -10

Fig. 8– Average number of unused multicast channels

As mentioned previously and can be seen in Fig. 3, MBS
synchronization leads to waste of resources because BSs in the
same MBS zone should transmit the same data regardless of
the number of users. Therefore, in some cells there may be
some multicast channels which are not used (e.g., Channel 2 in
cell 1 in Fig. 3). We vary the number of multicast channels
from one to 50 and calculate average number of unused
multicast channels for different number of total clients. The
simulation results are given in Fig. 8. It clearly makes sense
(95% confidence intervals)
C. Feasibility
According to what we discussed previously in Section IV,
we conduct the simulation and calculate available slots and
required slots for each multicast/unicast combination and
therefore evaluate the feasibility for a total number of 140
users. The result is shown in Fig. 9. As can be concluded from
the figure, only a small region is feasible (multicasting less
than 14 channels). This is because every user is served in
every frame. Using a smarter scheduling policy widens the
feasibility area.
Fig. 9– Feasibility analysis
D. Effect of scheduling on overhead
To evaluate the effects of scheduling policy on overhead
slots, the simulation is repeated for four different cases for the
total number of 210 users and the results are shown in Fig. 10.
As can be concluded from the figure, the maximum overhead
is achieved for case 1 when all users are served in every
frame. The difference between case i and case i+1 decreases
such that the distance between case 3 and case 4 is not
significant. The no-overhead curve is also shown for
comparison. It is worth noting that no scheduling policy (no
matter how smart it would be) can reach this curve, because
scheduling mechanisms can only affect and reduce the
variable part of the MAP overhead.
30 users per cell
1200
1000
800
Required Slots
600
400
200
0 by means of directly using our analytical evaluation method
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49
No. of Multicasted Channels
Fig. 10– Effect of scheduling on total bandwidth requirement
E. Comparing simulation and analytical results
To verify and validate the simulation results we conduct an
analytical evaluation for the total number of 210 users (30
users per cell). The curves of required slots (for data bursts
and control overhead) are compared in Fig. 11. As can be
seen, there is no significant difference between the results and
the analytical curve matches well with the simulation curve.
30 users per cell
1200
1000
800
Required Slots
600
400
200 Simulation
Anaytical
0
1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49
No. of Multica sted Channe ls
Fig. 11– Simulation vs. analytical method
VI- CONCLUSION
MBS in WiMAX can decrease bandwidth requirement in
IPTV systems from one burst per user to one burst per TV
channel. However, due to inefficiency of multicasting for
unpopular channels, using a combined multicast/unicast
transmission can be a better strategy in terms of MAP overhead.
We evaluated MAP overhead for different combinations of
multicast/unicast of TV channels. Simulation results shows that
increasing the number of IPTV users in the networks leads to
higher overhead but lower number of unused multicast
channels. Although a smart scheduling mechanism can reduce
the overhead slots, due to the fixed parts of the MAP overheads,
a portion of overhead slots can not be reduced. The methods for
overhead analysis introduced in this paper allow one to decide
for a given scenario (e.g., number of active IPTV users, number
of WiMAX cells in MBS zone, etc), which channels to multicast
and which to unicast in order to achieve optimum network
efficiency. It is not hard to determine the optimum during the
operation of an existing WiMAX system. For example, one
could directly use the results of simulation experiments carried
Case 1: every frame
out a priori for different number of users assuming a certain user
Case 2:every 2 frames behavior (e.g., channel watching probability) which could be
Case 3:every 3 frames observed beforehand. If the number of users is sufficiently large
Case 4: every 4 frames
we can determine this optimum in a still highly realistic manner
without overhead
(instead of having to run numerous simulation experiments).
Using more advanced techniques like opportunistic multicasting
can reduce the size of MAP overhead in MBS region and can be
investigated as a future work.
 REFERENCES
[1] L. Nuaymi, WiMAX: Technology for Broadband Wireless Access, John
Wiley & Sons, 2007.
[2] M. Cha, P. Rodriguez, J. Crowcroft, S. Moon, and X. Amatrianin,
“Watching Television over an IP Network,” Proc. ACM IMC, 2008.
[3] A. Abdollahpouri and B. E. Wolfinger, “On the Efficiency of
Multicasting for IPTV Delivery over IEEE 802.16j Networks,”
International Symposium on Performance Evaluation of Computer and
Telecommunication Systems, SPECTS 2011, The Hauge, Netherlands,
June 2011.
[4] A. Abdollahpouri, B. E. Wolfinger and J. Lai, “Unicast versus Multicast
for Live TV Delivery in Networks with Tree Topology,” 8th International
Conference on Wired/Wireless Internet Communications, WWIC 2010,
Lulea°, Sweden, June 2010.
[5] L. Nuaymi, N. Bouida, N. Lahbil, and P. Godlewski, “Headers Overhead
Estimation, Header Suppression and Header Compression in WiMAX,”
Third IEEE International Conference on Wireless and Mobile
Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob 2007), Oct. 2007.
[6] Y. Gao, L. Chen, X. Zhang, and Y. Jiang, “Performance Evaluation of
Mobile WiMAX with Dynamic Overhead,” in Proc. IEEE VTC-Fall,
Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Sep. 2008.
[7] E. Kim and N. Lee, “An Efficient Multicast and Broadcast Service in
IEEE 802.16e Wireless MANs,” IEEE 70th Vehicular Technology
Conference 2009, Anchorage, Sep. 2009.
View publication stats
[8] H. S. Kim and S. Yang, “Tiny MAP: An efficient MAP in IEEE
802.16/WiMAX Broadband Wireless Access Systems,” Computer
Communications, volume 30/9, pages 2122–2128, June 2007.
[9] J. Y. Kim and D.-H. Cho, “Piggybacking Scheme of MAP IE for
Minimizing MAC Overhead in the IEEE 802.16e OFDMA Systems,”
IEEE 66th Vehicular Technology Conference 2007, Baltimore, Sep.-Oct.
2007.
[10] V. Tykhomyrov, A. Sayenko, O. Puchko, and T. Hamalainen,
“Decreasing the MAP Overhead in the IEEE 802.16 OFDMA System,”
European Wireless Conference (EW) 2010, Lucca, June 2010.
[11] IMS Research, “A Global Merket Analysis, 2011 Edition,” 2011.
[12] T. Qiu, Z. Ge, S. Lee, J. Wang, Q. Zhao, and J. Xu, “Modeling User
Activities in a Large IPTV System,” SIGMETRICS/Performance 09, Seattle,
WA, USA, 2009.
[13] G. O’Driscoll: Next Generation IPTV Services and Technologies, John
Wiley & Sons, 2008.
[14] K. Etemad and L. Wang, “Multicast Broadcast Multimedia Services in
Mobile WiMAX Networks,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 47, no. 10, pp.
84–91, Oct. 2009.
[15] C. So-In, R. Jain, and A. Al-Tamimi, “Capacity Evaluation for IEEE
802.16e Mobile WiMAX,” Journal of Comp. Systems, Networks, and
Comm., April 2010.
[16] Mobile WiMAX- Part I: A Technical Overview and Performance
Evaluation White Paper.