Data Communication 2014 Monitoring QoS for Mobile Video Streaming Saltanat Muratbay Dr Salah Al-Majeed 3 rd year Student Course Instructor Electrical and Electronic Engineering Assistant Professor Abstract—With the rapid increase of the mobile internet users, the popularity of wireless media streaming services has grown also. Unfortunately, in today’s Internet technologies a best-effort delivery practice is prioritized, which compromises the transmission quality. This has negative effects, especially, on the video streaming due to its sensitiveness to transmission quality fluctuations. One of the powerful methods of addressing this issue is monitoring Quality of Service of the video streaming networks. Data obtained from QoS measurements can be useful in adjusting the video traffic to constraint the difficulties on the network transmission. In this paper, the concept of QoS has been reviewed, the experiences of similar researchers have been discussed and the most suitable approach has been implemented in the empirical part of the work. The research is based on the constructive method of the related papers and works and the results obtained are assumed to be made under real conditions. INTRODUCTION During the last years, the number of mobile users has grown tremendously, to the point that statistically more than 60% of the world population today own at least one cell phone, and it is estimated that by 2017 the number will grow up to 70% [1]. In addition to that, progress in modern electronics reflected on the versatility and multifunctionality of mobile phones, so that today the customers expect their devices serve them not only as communication tools but also as source of entertainment where the video streaming is considered to be an essential part. Thus, the electronics manufacturers are racing to deliver a greater diversity of movable gadgets that are able to demonstrate digital video streaming. To understand what is mobile video streaming, let us firstly clarify what is streaming media itself. Streaming media is a technique of transferring data that allows the users to view or here media files in a continuous stream (mode) without downloading them on a device [2]. This became possible with the growth of Internet. As of mobile video streaming, it has appeared fairly quickly as the Internet became wireless. The video is provided to a mobile device with the use of wireless digital signals. Now it is one of the most popular types of media streaming. [2]. Mobile video streaming enables customers to watch online news programs, movies, music video clips, online TV, real-time mobile-to-mobile video, access to video conferences, anytime and anyplace, where internet is available. For this, modern mobile devices are able to support different wireless communication technologies as Bluetooth, 3G and 802.11 WLAN [3]. However, all of these services can provide only limited resolution video because they have to share available wireless bandwidth with other users [3], thus they cannot guarantee continuous high quality stream of video files on mobiles. As the newly developed high-tech smartphones, such as flagship products of Apple, Google Nexus, HTC, Nokia etc., which in fact able to support video of significantly higher resolution that the mobile networks actually can provide, the problem of resolution gap between streaming video and customer displays occurs [3]. Other impairments that go along with the limited bandwidth are bandwidth jittering and transmission errors that occur in mobile networks [4]. As the video streaming is very sensitive to any transmission quality fluctuations, the visual artifacts, delays, loss of audio became usual distortions on client screens. In order to improve the quality of mobile video streaming different QoS monitoring techniques have been developed. Data obtained from QoS measurements can be useful in adjusting the video traffic so that it will be able to confront the difficulties on the network transmission which leads to improvement of the quality of the video perception [5]. The purpose of the research is to examine the concept of QoS, to investigate different QoS monitoring approaches and find out the most appropriate one and try to obtain empirical evidence of its effectiveness.