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LTE-EMU: A High Fidelity LTE Cellar Network Testbed for Mobile Video Streaming

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Abstract

With the increasing number of commercially launched LTE network service, LTE protocol itself has entered a mature stage. Evaluations and optimizations of mobile video streaming services over LTE network have been a hot issue to meet the advancing customers’ requirements for quality of service. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no convinced testbed for LTE cellar network, which can reproduce the actual end-to-end transmission characteristics observed on real LTE network, is currently available. This situation poses limitations on the demonstration and comparison of the effectiveness of the optimization results claimed by different research groups. To bridge this gap, herein, we first design and implement an end-to-end network testbed for LTE cellar network called LTE-EMU. The testbed is a hybrid solution by combining methods of simulation and emulation. Then, we prove that the fidelity of LTE-EMU is significantly higher than an LTE simulation environment through the fidelity model presented in the paper. The bases of evaluating the fidelity are the actual end-to-end transmission characteristics collected on real LTE network through field test approach. Finally, using a case study, we show the usefulness of LTE-EMU in mobile video streaming service evaluation. The testbed is also publicly accessible for other wireless protocol and application optimization.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by ’The Fundamental Theory and Applications of Big Data with Knowledge Engineering’ under the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No.2016YFB1000 903, the National Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61472317, 61428206, 61221063, 91118005, 91218301, the MOE Innovation Research Team under Grant No. IRT13035, the Co-ordinator Innovation Proj-ect for the Key Lab of Shaanxi Province under Grant No. 2013SZS05-Z01, and the Project of China Knowledge Centre for Engineering Science and Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SPKLSTN Lab, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Haipeng Du, Qinghua Zheng, Weizhan Zhang & Yunhui Huang

Authors
  1. Haipeng Du
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  2. Qinghua Zheng
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  3. Weizhan Zhang
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  4. Yunhui Huang
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Correspondence to Weizhan Zhang.

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Du, H., Zheng, Q., Zhang, W. et al. LTE-EMU: A High Fidelity LTE Cellar Network Testbed for Mobile Video Streaming. Mobile Netw Appl 22, 454–463 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-017-0868-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-017-0868-z

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