Evaluation of mobile video streaming in heterogeneous wireless networks

Recently, the number of mobile users equipped with wireless devices capable of video streaming on the go has increased immensely. The trend follows the ever expanding choice of multi-access wireless technologies to which they connect and the growing popularity of mobile video applications. In this paper, we evaluate mobile video streaming over heterogeneous wireless networks. We design and implement a hybrid evaluation framework consisting of a testbed network and an emulator. We focus on the network-layer quality of service (QoS) for multihomed mobile hosts moving at pedestrian or vehicular speeds across WiMAX and Wi-Fi networks. Extensive experiments are carried out running the widely adopted MPEG-2 standard and the current MPEG-4/AVC standard of increasing dominance. Experimental results present the performance of mobile video streaming in different scenarios depending on the user´s movement speeds and video coding standards. It is further demonstrated that MPEG-4/AVC outperformed MPEG-2 in terms of throughput, packet delays, packet loss and jitter.