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

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.