Quality of Real-Time Streaming in Wireless Cellular Networks — Stochastic Modeling and Analysis

We present a new stochastic service model with capacity sharing and interruptions, appropriate for the evaluation of the quality of real-time streaming (e.g. mobile TV) in wireless cellular networks. It takes into account multi-class Markovian process of call arrivals (to capture different radio channel conditions, requested streaming bit-rates and call-durations) and allows for a general resource allocation policy saying which users are temporarily denied the requested fixed streaming bit-rates (put in outage) due to resource constraints. We develop general expressions for the performance characteristics of this model, including the mean outage duration and the mean number of outage incidents for a typical user of a given class, involving only the steady-state of the traffic demand. We propose also a natural class of least-effort-served-first resource allocation policies, which cope with optimality and fairness issues known in wireless networks, and whose performance metrics can be easily calculated using Fourier analysis of Poisson variables. We specify and use our model to analyze the quality of real time streaming in 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks. Our results can be used for the dimensioning of these networks.