Performance emulation of mobile video transmission in high-speed rail environment

In recent years, wireless video transmission attracts more and more attention from both academia and industry with the advancement of wireless communications and Internet technologies. However, by now, most studies focus on video transmission in static or low-speed mobile environment. To the best of our knowledge, the performance of video transmission in high-speed mobile environment (such as high-speed railway) has not been investigated yet. Considering the unique features of wireless channels in high-speed rail environment, in this work, we developed a novel mobile video emulation platform to evaluate the performance of video transmission in high-speed rail environment. This mobile video emulation platform is based on a software radio system (a.k.a. “Sora”) developed by Microsoft Research. The performance of video transmission under different moving speeds and channel conditions are tested and compared. The emulation results show that, in general, the lower the train speed, the better the received video quality. A lot of challenging research issues have to be addressed in order to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) for mobile video transmission in high-speed rail environment, especially under the Rayleigh fading channels with significant Doppler spread.