Evaluation of Resiliency Solutions for Real-Time Multimedia Streams in a UTRAN Scenario

UMTS, as a third generation mobile communications system, has been developed to offer, in addition to traditional basic services - such as voice telephony, broader data connections and multimedia services. Channel reliability, the most common problem affecting mobile communications, strongly influences such new services and, in particular, the quality of multimedia streams. Nevertheless, current solutions do not foresee resiliency mechanisms suitable for real-time applications. In this paper we evaluate the benefits and effects of some resiliency tools onto the final quality of real-time multimedia streams in a UTRAN scenario: the proposed solutions span from FEC and ARQ to redundant video-information and enhanced packet-queue management. The analysis is performed by means of simulations modeling UTRAN FDD mode, with error events at the PDU level (simulated by means of a hidden Markov model)