Performance evaluation of 3D video streaming services in LTE-A networks

Due to the ever growing interest of 3-dimensional (3D) technology, together with the the widespread use of new generation smartphones, netbooks, and tablets, the idea to provide 3D multimedia services also to mobile users is attracting the attention of researchers worldwide. The emerging long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) technology seems to have all the potential to offer such kind of services but no accurate studies have been yet conducted to demonstrate this assumption. To bridge this gap, we investigate herein how the LTE-A network configuration, the traffic load, and 3D video settings may influence to the quality of all services of all active flows. We consider a heterogeneous LTE-A network composed by macro and pico cells and a number of users uniformly distributed into the scenario, that receive at the same time 3D video streams, voice flows and best-effort applications. Moreover, several objective metrics, such as the ratio of lost packets, the peak signal to noise ratio, the Structural SIMilarity, the application goodput, and packet delays, have been evaluated to show the LTE-A effectiveness in delivering 3D videos in a realistic last generation mobile environment. © 2014, Springer Science+Business Media New York.