Performance study of video streaming in commercial UMTS network

This paper studies the performance of a real-time application in a live Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network. In the study, special user equipment (UE) capable of collecting performance parameters such as throughput and bit error rate (BER) was used. Two scenarios are considered in this paper: typical scenario when soft handover (SHO) is enabled and an extreme scenario when a situation of cell edge is created by forcing the terminal to strictly connect to one cell. The experiment results show various aspects of practical implementations and protocols which are currently used in live UMTS network. In the typical scenario, when a code with a large spreading factor (SF) is in use, the required signal-to-noise ratio target (SIRT) is low. In the cell edge case, a code with high SF of 32 is used in a poor radio condition. There results are consistent with the relevant theory.