Mobile video's butterfly effect

Noam Green
09 Jul 2014
00:00

Mobile video traffic continues to increase at a breakneck pace, pushing the limits of mobile networks.

The introduction and deployment of LTE networks offers real promise for handling the increase in traffic. However, subscribers’ insatiable appetite for mobile data, including high-definition video, is increasing faster than 4G network capacity.

Mobile video traffic, if not managed correctly, can negatively impact all network users, creating a ripple effect in the network which may resemble a similar concept known as the “butterfly effect.”

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is where a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. For mobile subscribers, video traffic in a congested network creates a butterfly effect by degrading other types of traffic and reducing overall quality of experience even before it affects video traffic.

Video traffic consumes large blocks of bandwidth due to a larger packet size and clogs the network proportionally more than lighter types of network traffic, such as images and text. As a result, mobile video traffic poses a threat to user experience for all subscribers, including those who are not viewing video on their mobile devices.

An average LTE site has a total throughput of 40 Mbps, and one HD 1080p You Tube Video requires 8 Mbps. This means that if six users are simultaneously viewing HD video on a single cell, the cell is already pushed beyond capacity.

The problem is, in addition to resulting in buffering or jittery video for those running YouTube on mobile devices, all subscribers are affected. Video packets are transmitted in larger buckets of TCP packets (also referred to as having a larger TCP window size), meaning that in a congested network they may get higher priority in the TCP flow than other types of traffic which send over small buckets of data. Due to the way TCP is designed, this inherent unfairness creates situations where smaller volume traffic, such as browsing, is slowed down due to the larger video packets flooding the network.

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