Video streaming is quickly becoming the most common use case for Internet traffic globally. The dominant real-time entertainment service supplier, YouTube, with 23.4% of the daily traffic in North America [1], employs HTTP adaptive streaming, DASH. This is made possible with the ever-increasing Quality of Service (QoS) and bandwidth capabilities of today’s Internet. Technologies used by hosts for video streaming include Ethernet, WiFi and LTE (Long Term Evolution). The popularity of Ethernet is waning as more and more people make use of mobile devices and laptops which do not possess Ethernet ports. Video streaming over LTE is gaining traction in North America as people opt to do their YouTube or Netflix streaming while commuting to work or traveling. While LTE poses interesting challenges to video streaming, it was not investigated in this report because our version of Riverbed Modeler, the Academic Edition version 17.5, does not allow the use of LTE technology. WiFi is now available on university campuses, schools, coffee shops, shopping malls, restaurants and even on public transit in some countries. It has become ubiquitous and it is therefore a good choice of technology to investigate in this report. We make use of Riverbed Modeler to simulate various scenarios and record useful statistics such as throughput and packet delay to see how WiFi performs for video streaming. The platform chosen is YouTube because it is the dominant entertainment service supplier. We show results of simulations in which the video display resolutions was varied from 720p (720 pixels, progressive scan) to 1080p.

Report

The final report can be found here. It can be compiled from our GitHub repository.

Presentation

The final presentation can be found here.

References

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[13] “Quality of Service.” https://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~pxk/417/notes/03-qos.html Accessed: 2020-03-31.

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[20] S. Calzada, C. Rietchel, and T. Szajner, “Performance Analysis of a Wireless Home Network."

[21] A. Singh and D. Labayo, “Performance Analysis of Video Streaming over Wi-Fi and Ethernet.”

[22] J. Kim, J. Zheng, and P. Bertsch, “Video Streaming over Wi-Fi.”

[23] M. Ng and C. H. Weng, “Video Streaming over WiFi using Riverbed Modeler.”

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