Simulation of Video Streaming Over Wireless Networks with NS-3

TL;DR

This paper introduces an NS-3 simulation platform for evaluating wireless video streaming performance, enabling cost-effective, real-time analysis of adaptive streaming over shared wireless channels.

Contribution

It presents a novel NS-3-based simulation environment that models video streaming over wireless networks with adaptive rate control, reducing the need for costly real-world testing.

Findings

Effective simulation of multi-stream wireless video sharing

Real-time performance measurement capabilities

Insights into adaptive rate control effectiveness

Abstract

The combination of video streaming services and wireless networks plays an important role in many fields. In this paper, we present an NS-3-based simulation platform for evaluating and optimizing the performance of the video streaming application over wireless networks. The simulation is designed to provide real-time measurements, and thus it saves the high costs for real equipment. The developed platform consists of the video streaming server, video streaming client, and wireless network environment, where the video streaming operation is implemented under UDP protocol and is equipped with an application-level adaptive rate controller. We use the platform to simulate different use cases of sharing a wireless multi-access channel among multiple video streams.