Statistical validation of an LTE emulation tool using live video streaming over reliable transport protocols

Multimedia services such as Live Video-Streaming (LVS) or Video on Demand are the main drivers behind the notable traffic growth in cellular networks. This fact has attracted the interest of both academia and telcos in improving the end user’s quality of experience. For this reason, the development of test benches for conducting traffic studies in this type of telecommunication system is necessary and emulators are a good option to validate possible solutions without affecting the real systems. However, most works addressing the emulation of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) systems do not validate their outcomes with real environments and hence ignore critical parameters such as the impact of wireless propagation under different scenarios. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to validate an outdoor propagation model for LVS so that accurate studies of traffic characterization in LTE networks can be carried out using an emulation tool. The validation is done through a statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) of Quality of Service metrics, comparing the results obtained in an LTE-emulated scenario with those obtained in a real LTE test bench. For this study, the LVS service runs on top of a reliable transport protocol. Specifically, we test the Real-Time Message Protocol and the MPEG Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) protocol, both using TCP at the transport layer. According to the results, the propagation model that better matches the real environment under the considered conditions is the Nakagami-m propagation model with m = 5.