A multimedia traffic modeling framework for simulation-based performance evaluation studies

The emergence of high-speed communication systems has enabled the support of complex multimedia applications. The traffic patterns generated by such applications are likely to be more complicated than those of simple voice and data traffic sources. Source traffic models are very important in the performance evaluation of traffic control algorithms in communications networks. In this paper, a multimedia traffic modeling framework is presented. The framework dissociates the traffic generated by a multimedia application into a number of basic components and derives a traffic model for each component. These components are then integrated into a multimedia traffic source model. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) is presented to facilitate the traffic modeling process. These multimedia traffic models can be easily integrated into simulation studies. In order to illustrate the usefulness of the framework, a performance evaluation study of scheduling algorithms for the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) feature of UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) is presented. It was found that a Cost Function-based scheduling algorithm that takes into account the head-of-line packet delays of all components of the multimedia application achieved a higher average user throughput.