QoE-Oriented Performance Evaluation of Video Streaming over WiMAX

Mobile broadband wireless networks, such as WiMAX, have been developed over the last years in order to support wireless access to real-time multimedia applications like Voice over IP or Video on Demand. To this aim, these networks are designed to provide guarantees in terms of network-related QoS parameters, like loss, delay, or jitter. However, the assessment of the performance of multimedia applications requires to take into account also the Quality of Experience (QoE), which is related to the quality of the service as it is perceived by the user, and is better measured by different metrics, like MOS or PSNR. In this paper, we first describe the simulation framework we developed to assess the QoE of video streaming over WiMAX. The framework integrates a WiMAX simulator based on ns-2 with tools for analyzing H.264/SVC compressed video, and allows to estimate the PSNR of actual videos whose streaming is simulated over WiMAX by means of ns-2. Based on this framework, we carry out a performance evaluation by considering videos encoded with different H.264/SVC scalability options and under realistic network conditions.