A multiuser simulation system for video transmission over HSDPA

With the explosive growth of multimedia applications, video transmission over HSDPA networks has attracted more and more attentions. Particularly in the last few years, lots of special transmission schemes have been proposed to improve the end-to-end qualities of mobile video applications. However, due to lack of a common video delivery simulation platform over HSDPA networks, the researchers have met obstacles in evaluating and comparing the performance of these schemes in a unified simulation environment. To fill this gap, a common system-level video transmission simulation platform is proposed in this paper, which is implemented specially for the HSDPA networks. To the best of our knowledge, this platform is the first one in integrating the video encoder/decoder, the video quality evaluator and the HSDPA simulator together. In this way, the researchers can study and analyze not only the overall system performance of the video-aware cross-layer transmission solutions, but also explore the influence and interaction of those separate sub-layers in the HSDPA wireless networks, such as the video application-layer, the transmission control layer, the HSDPA MAC layer, and the physical layer. Moreover, to test and verify our simulation platform, we implement eight representative fast scheduling algorithms over the HSDPA networks, and evaluate their transmission performances for the H.264/AVC video applications. Experimental simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of our simulation system.