Streaming Video Capacities of LTE Air-Interface

The 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems have been designed to deliver higher peak data rates, higher capacity and lower air-interface latency compared to prior 2G and 3G systems. This high performance will make it possible to support more demanding applications beyond web browsing and voice, which will require higher data rates and QoS guarantees. Video services are becoming very popular over the Internet. With the wide deployment of LTE in the near future, the demand for high data-rate video applications over cellular wireless will grow. However, in order to make these services commercially viable, it is necessary that the LTE air-interface can deliver high quality services to a sizeable number of users simultaneously. In this paper we investigate the downlink video capacities of the LTE air-interface by dynamic system simulation using realistic video traffic models and detailed models of the LTE air-interface. We investigate how video quality and system outage criteria impact the air-interface video capacities and describe observations on video stream quality and operator revenue under certain cost assumptions.