SUMMARYThis paper investigates the problem of multiuser multimedia communication over orthogonal frequency‐division multiple‐access downlink systems. A cross‐layer design is proposed to maximize the received video quality of all the users subject to the network resource constraint. With the optimal joint subcarrier assignment and power allocation, the proposed scheme can maximally satisfy the requirements of the packet scheduling from the higher layer. Employing the Lagrange dual decomposition method, we can obtain the global optimal solution to the optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has superior performance compared with the existing alternatives. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.