Performance Evaluation of Video Transcoding and Caching Solutions in Mobile Networks

The rapid growth in demand for video streaming applications is stressing the performance of wireless access networks. To alleviate congestion, vendors currently propose devices to be placed in the operator´s network that transcode videos to a lower rate in order to reduce traffic volume in case of congestion. The devices are also able to cache popular videos, both to reduce the burden of transcoding and to alleviate backhaul load. The paper proposes a model of this augmented radio access network enabling an evaluation of the performance benefits for given transcoding and caching capacities. Our results show that a gain in cell capacity of 15% can be realized with moderate transcoding and cache capacities.