3D Video transmissions over LTE: A performance evaluation

The emerging broadband cellular technology, i.e. the Long Term Evolution (LTE), aims to support different services with high data rates and strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. It can thus be considered a very promising architecture for the three-dimensional (3D) video transmission. Differently from the conventional 2D video, the depth perception is the most important aspect characterizing 3D streams. It significantly influences the mobile users Quality of Experience (QoE). However, it requires the transmission of additional information as well as more bandwidth and a lower loss probability. The goal of this paper is to investigate how both 3D video formats and their average encoding rate impact on the quality experienced by the end users when the video flow is delivered through the LTE network. To this aim, objective metrics like the ratio of lost packets, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, delay, and goodput are adopted for measuring QoS and QoE degrees. At the end of this analysis, we provide some important considerations about the LTE effectiveness for 3D video delivering.