Performance Evaluation of Interactive Video Streaming over WiMAX Network

Abstract

Nowadays, the desire of internet access and the need of digital encodings have influenced quite a large number of users to access high quality video application. Offering multimedia services not only to the wired but to wireless mobile client is becoming more viable. In wireless medium, video-streaming still has high resource requirements, for example, bandwidth, traffic priority, smooth play-backs. Therefore, bandwidth demands of these applications are far exceeding the capacity of 3G and Wireless Local Area Networks (LANs). The current research demonstrates the introductory understanding of the Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMax) network, applications, the mechanisms, its potential features, and techniques used to provide QoS in WiMAX, and lastly the network is simulated  to report the diverse requirements of streamed video conferencing traffic and its specifications. For this purpose two input parameters of video traffic are selected, i.e, refresh rate, which is monitored in terms of frames per second and pixel resolutions which basically counts the number of pixels in digital imaging. The network model is developed in OPNET. Different outcomes from simulation based models are analyzed and appropriate reasons are also discussed. Apart from this, the second aim of the current research is to address whether WiMAX access technology for streaming video applications could provide comparable network performance to Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL). For this purpose network metrices such as End to End delay and throughput is taken into consideration for optimization.