Optimal beam steering for maximal visual quality over a multimedia broadcasting system

Various types of multimedia services have become prominent over the last few years leading to difficulty in providing high-quality broadcast multimedia services in certain shadowing regions without resource management in accordance with specific channel adaptation. In order to overcome this difficulty, return channel design has been actively discussed in broadcasting standards for broadcasting systems. Context-Aware multimedia services have been developed by adapting radio resources according to service type. In order to forward this goal, we propose a beamforming technique to optimize spatial resources in order to maximize visual quality for video broadcasting services. In order to enhance the video broadcast service, we derive expected visual information (EVI) that quantifies the visual quality of video and adapt the EVI into multiple-input and multiple-output beamforming techniques in a video broadcast system. In order to guarantee the proportional fairness of broadcast users, we propose a novel beam steering algorithm using the log-EVI sum maximization, and compare it to the traditional channel-quality-based max-min problem. The beamsteering algorithm is performed iteratively while switching the bases, which constructs a beam steering weight vector domain. In the simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has less computational complexity than conventional algorithms, and the visual quality of the proposed algorithm is enhanced over that of the traditional quasi-optimal max-min fairness algorithm.