Soft capacity of OFDMA networks is suitable for soft QoS multimedia traffic

Multimedia traffic is expected to be widespread in next generation wireless networks, which will be likely based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access. While multimedia content is heavily demanding in terms of network resources, it is also inherently adaptable at the application layer, thereby imposing soft QoS constraints, rather than strict requirements on a specific data rate. In this paper, we specifically investigate the suitability of such a medium access control rationale for this kind of traffic. It turns out that, if properly managed, next generation networks can accommodate several multimedia users, thanks to a proper exploitation of user and frequency diversity. However, on the application side a great deal of attention should be paid to take advantage of scalability of the video flows and adaptability of this kind of traffic, to exploit the network capacity at its fullest.