Evaluation of UMTS RLC Parameters for MPEG-4 Video Streaming

Abstract

Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems (UMTS) known as Third Generation (3G) mobile phone systems using Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) standard aim to provide a high bit rate of services to enable a high quality of multimedia communications. The 3G specification entity, 3GPP, has defined a reliable link layer protocol, Radio Link Control (RLC), for hiding transmission errors from upper layers. Due to the complexity of the protocol and the a number of parameter configurations available, there are many ways that can degrade a system performance, such as incorrect parameters configuration, buffer missmanagement, protocol stalling, etc. MPEG-4 is widely used for video stream services due to its good video quality at low bit rate. In this paper, we have studied on the impacts of RLC parameters, especially RLC timer and polling mechanism, for MPEG-4 video stream transmission by using a computer simulation. Our simulation results provide some suggestions value to optimize such parameters, e.g. RLC time and polling.