Video and audio trace files of pre-encoded video content for network performance measurements

Video services are expected to account for a large portion of the traffic in future wireless networks. Therefore, realistic traffic sources are needed to investigate the network performance of future communication protocols. Previously, we provided a publicly available library of frame size traces of long MPEG-4 and H.263 encoded videos in the QCIF format resulting in low bandwidth video streams. These traces can be used in 3G network simulations. Some future communication systems, such as WLAN systems, offer high data rates and therefore high quality video can be transmitted over such higher speed networks. We now present an addition to our existing trace library. For this addition we collected over 100 pre-encoded video sequences from the Web, generated the trace files, and conducted a thorough statistical evaluation. Because the pre-encoded video sequences are encoded by different users, their video settings differ in terms of codec, quality, format, and length. The advantage of user diversity for encoding is that it reflects very well the traffic situation in upcoming WLANs. Thus, the new traces are very suitable for the network performance evaluation of future WLANs.