Ns-2 Based Emulator for Multicast Services

It is not easy to achieve real-time video transmission testbed on WiMax, due to the lack availability of WiMax networks. This paper presents a ns-2 based emulator to evaluate the quality of multicast video services transmitted over an IEEE 802.16 wireless network. The impact of the modulation schemes and the cyclic prefix, on the throughput and video quality were discussed and the performance of the proposed emulator was evaluated. Specially, the results about the emulator´s performance are relevant when real-time services are taken into account. The main contribution in this paper is the general guidelines provided to develop an efficient real-time multicast streaming video testbed on wireless networks, exploiting the potentialities of a tool as ns-2.