Video transport optimization techniques design and evaluation for next generation cellular networks

Video is foreseen to be the dominant type of data traffic in the Internet. This vision is supported by a number of studies which forecast that video traffic will drastically increase in the following years, surpassing Peer-to-Peer traffic in volume already in the current year. Current infrastructures are not prepared to deal with this traffic increase. The current Internet, and in particular the mobile Internet, was not designed with video requirements in mind and, as a consequence, its architecture is very inefficient for handling this volume of video traffic. When a large part of traffic is associated to multimedia entertainment, most of the mobile infrastructure is used in a very inefficient way to provide such a simple service, thereby saturating the whole cellular network, and leading to perceived quality levels that are not adequate to support widespread end user acceptance. The main goal of the research activity in this thesis is to evolve the mobile Internet architecture for efficient video traffic support. As video is expected to represent the majority of the traffic, the future architecture should efficiently support the requirements of this data type, and specific enhancements for video should be introduced at all layers of the protocol stack where needed. These enhancements need to cater for improved quality of experience, improved reliability in a mobile world (anywhere, anytime), lower exploitation cost, and increased flexibility. In this thesis a set of video delivery mechanisms are designed to optimize the video transmission at different layers of the protocol stack and at different levels of the cellular network. Upon the architectural choices, resource allocation schemes are implemented to support a range of video applications, which cover video broadcast/multicast streaming, video on demand, real-time streaming, video progressive download and video upstreaming. By means of simulation, the benefits of the designed mechanisms in terms of perceived video quality and network resource saving are shown and compared to existing solutions. Furthermore, selected modules are implemented in a real testbed and some experimental results are provided to support the development of such transport mechanisms in practice