Advanced Content Delivery, Streaming, and Cloud Services

Chapter 7Mobile Video Streaming

Ram Lakshmi Narayanan, Yinghua Ye, Anuj Kaul and Mili Shah

Nokia Siemens Networks, Mountain View, CA, USA

7.1 Introduction

It is widely observed that video content contributes to major portion of the Internet traffic. Both user-generated content (UGC) traffic from YouTube [1] and premium traffic such as Netflix [2] are major contributors in the United States. It is anticipated that the video traffic is expected to increase by many folds due to the increase in penetration of smartphone and tablets [3]. Such a sudden explosion of video traffic makes network unmanageable. Lessons learnt from deploying fourth-generation mobile network such as long-term evolution (LTE) and 3G mobile network such as wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) technologies have shown that video streaming does not perform well over mobile broadband networks. Major reasons for such poor performance are too many parallel developments in services, applications that are not network friendly and demand more data, and smartphones consuming energy than they required. To manage network traffic, wireless operators move from flat rate billing to the tiered billing. Though such measure is considered temporary, but it clearly puts the requirement to improve the network infrastructure and service utilization.

Video streaming service has strict requirements for latency and bandwidth throughout the video play. To satisfy these requirements, mobile operators have increased their ...