Performance evaluation in ns-3 of a video delivery framework for next generation cellular networks

Abstract

Video mobile applications can be served via multiple delivery paths from the video server to the end user, thus delivering different video qualities. Throughput and delay highly depend on the video paths available in the core network and on the availability of wireless access technologies in the last hop. We consider a set of characteristics of the whole video delivery chain to univocally identify each available path and we develop a framework for the selection of the best video path in terms of throughput and packet delivery delay. We further extend the framework, implementing at the access points a tunable traffic shaping mechanism to decrease the delivery delay while maintaining the number of packets delivered. We evaluate our framework by means of simulation in ns-3, an event-based network simulator able to accurately model the Long Term Evolution (LTE) core and access networks

A virtualized platform for analyzing LTE broadcast services

“…In [5], the authors describe a real-time testbed used to assess the end-to-end performance of multimedia services in an LTE network, but the analysis is based on video streaming over RTP instead of the current 3GPP proposal based on DASH. Other works [6] [7], follow an approach based on a simulation tool that emulates a video streaming service over a simulated LTE network. However, they do not simulate the FLUTE transmission of the video segments over a multicast channel.…”