MOBILE MULTIMEDIA TRAFFIC ANALYSIS: CLIENTS CAN WASTE NETWORK BANDWIDTH?

Video is increasingly becoming one of the most pervasive technologies in terms of everyday usage, both for entertainment and in the enterprise environments. Mobile video is responsible for a majority of the growth seen in mobile broadband data volume. Video streaming on mobile devices is on the rise. According to recent reports, mobile video streaming traffic accounted for 52.8% of total mobile data traffic in 2011, and it is forecast to reach 66.4% in 2015. The network traffic behaviors of the two most popular HTTP-based video streaming services: YouTube and Netflix. The research indicates that the network traffic behavior depends on factors such as the type of device, multimedia applications in use and network conditions. Furthermore, it is found that a large part of the downloaded video content can be unaccepted by a video player even though it is successfully delivered to a client. This unwanted behavior often occurs when the video player changes the resolution in a fluctuating network condition and the play out buffer is full while downloading a video. Some of the measurements show that the discarded data may exceed 35% of the total video content. The spike in mobile video streaming has come about as a result of the development of the smartphone. Smartphones registered a 5% to 40% market penetration between 2007 and 2010 in the United States. In the third quarter of 2011, smartphone sales increased by 42% from 2010. Mobile Operators are facing an explosion in wireless data use, which is projected to grow 18-fold from 2011 to 2016 per the latest Cisco VNI forecast. With the use of mobile devices increasing so rapidly, and almost half of the traffic on mobile internet networks being accounted for by video sessions, mobile service providers have begun to recognize the need to provide higher quality video access while using the lowest possible bandwidth.[ With the release of the iPhone 5 in September 2012, it has been predicted that LTE networks might experience decreased data speeds as streaming multimedia begins to tax the 4G network. Cloud-based content optimizers that reduce the strain of over-the-top multimedia streaming could provide potential relief to mobile providers.