Capacity Dimensioning for Real-Time Video Services in Wireless Mobile Networks

It is important for mobile operators to take video services into consideration for dimensioning. The major difficulty when considering real-time video service is the presence of two time scales: the scale of arrival/departures of flows and the packet arrival scale. In this paper, we combine flow-level dynamics with an M/D/1 model for studying the packet delay performance of real-time video services in mobile networks. We show that for the services like live TV video, the video delay constraint is large enough that it becomes of low importance when dealing with the system capacity. Using fluid model with flow level can be sufficient for calculating the maximum system load; it thus simplifies the calculations in the general case of a mix of different codecs and different radio conditions. However, for services with more stringent delay constraints, detailed packet modeling is still needed.