Simulation Framework and Performance Analysis of Multimedia Broadcasting Service over Wireless Networks Won J. Jeon, Kyungtae Kang, Roy H. Campbell, and Klara Nahrstedt Department of Computer Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Email: {wonjeon,ktkang,rhc,klara}@illinois.edu Abstract The recent development of high-speed data transmission over wireless networks enables multimedia broadcasting service to mobile users. Multimedia broadcasting service involves interactions among different system and network components, so it is crucial for the service provider to verify the correctness of system/service model and design, and their behaviors before a new type of service is deployed. However, due to limitations of using network simulations or scaled experimental testbeds, there has been none of re- search on such verification and simulation framework in 3G broadcasting networks. Therefore, we propose a simulation and analysis framework for multimedia broadcasting service over wireless networks. With concrete modeling of wireless physical channel, network, and data processing on a client device, it enables the prediction of various interesting system parameters and perceived quality of multimedia streams to users. Different models of system and network components can be plugged easily in our simulation framework for further extensions. Using this framework, we analyze the processing performance for decoding scalable videos on mobile devices in CDMA2000 wireless networks. 1. Introduction The recent development of high-speed data transmission over wireless networks enables various multimedia broad- casting services which require higher data rate than ordinary data services such as web browsing and mail service. As the network throughput increases, it is obvious that mobile client devices have to process such multimedia streamed data accordingly in a timed manner. Especially for real-time multimedia applications, guaranteeing timing constraints of processing received streams is much more important than preserving tight data integrity of the streams, from user and quality’s perspective. Multimedia broadcasting service over wireless networks involves interactions among different system and network components. Therefore, it is crucial for the service provider The corresponding author is K. Kang. to verify the correctness of system/service model and de- sign, and their behaviors before a new type of service is considered for deployment. However, it is difficult to verify the system and service as a whole. Different wireless carriers and device manufacturers create and maintain their products according to their specifications only, so it is very common to observe the unexpected malfunctionality and performance degradation. Due to complexity and size of the whole system, prototyping a real system or its temporal deployment is not regarded as a good approach to resolve such unexpectedness. Such difficulties in verification of system and service com- ponents in wireless networks before deployment have been addressed in different contexts. Using network simulation tools such as OPNET [1] and ns-2 [2], simulating network models [3], [4], or mimicking the network system with scaled emulations [5] provide an approximation on particular network components only, not the whole system including data processing and quality-aware applications on mobile devices. Due to these difficulties, there has been not much work done in 3G broadcasting service. In this paper, we propose a simulation and analysis frame- work for multimedia broadcasting service over wireless net- works. This tool precisely models a real system architecture and is used for verification of the model. By simulating wireless physical channel, network, and data processing on a client device, it enables the prediction of the system throughput based on the characteristics of wireless channels and networks, and the performance of stream process on the client devices. By using this tool, we analyze the client’s processing performance for decoding scalable videos in CDMA2000 wireless networks. Most of the recent chipsets from QUAL- COMM for CDMA2000 1xEV-DO or CDMA2000 1xEV- DO Rev. A incorporate ARM9 or ARM11 microproces- sor [6], and the processing of forward error correction on such mobile devices with ARM11 processor is measured by using ARM Toolkit. Also, the delay of processing due to dynamics of network channels and quality of video streams are also monitored. Our contributions are as follows. First, we provide a flexible simulation and analysis framework for multimedia 2009 29th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems 1063-6927/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ICDCS.2009.49 93