This paper studies the optimal frequency reuse for the transmission of multimedia scalable sources, such as embedded images or scalable video, which need unequal error protection or unequal transmission rates in the bitstream. First, we analyze the crossover of the outage probabilities for full and partial frequency reuse cases in terms of the data rate. We prove that we can find a crossover of the outage probability curves for a data rate lower than a given threshold, which is a function of the parameters such as the partial frequency reuse factor and the user location in the cell. Moreover, the crossover point in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is a strictly increasing function of the data rate. On the other hand, for a data rate higher than or equal to the threshold, there is no crossover; for all SNRs, the outage probability of full-frequency reuse is lower than that of partial-frequency reuse. The results are proven for the arbitrary location of a user in a cell, and for an arbitrary partial frequency reuse factor. Furthermore, the results hold, regardless of the numbers of transmit and receive antennas in the multiple-input multiple-output systems of orthogonal space-time block codes, and of the vertical Bell Labs space-time architecture with a zero-forcing linear receiver. Based on the analysis, we propose unequal-frequency reuse for the optimal transmission of scalable sources. The numerical results show that the peakSNR performance improves when a sequence of scalable packets is transmitted at the subbands governed by unequal-frequency reuse in cellular networks.
