Abstract: Packet scheduling remains a critical issue for the transmission of scalable video streaming over wireless broadcasting channel. To achieve the optimal receiving video quality, a packet scheduling algorithm based on the optimization strategy of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) was proposed. It adopts POMDP to establish a complete optimization scheduling mathematical model on the condition that the state of the user is uncertain or partially observable. Compared with traditional packet scheduling algorithms, the experimental results show that the proposed scheme can efficiently improve the average PSNR. With the increase of the number of users, the performance of the proposed POMDP model asymptotically approaches to the ideal MDP model in which the state information is completely observable.