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

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.