Third International Conference on Broadband Communications, Information Technology & Biomedical Applications

Video Streaming over HSDPA for Delivery of

Essential Services in Under Serviced Areas in
Africa
1
Amimo-Rayolla P. O., 2Marcel Odhiambo and 2Kurien A., (1 & 2 Members, IEEE)

The growth of cellular telephony (Figure 2 and 3) has however,

Abstract — In the last decade, the growth in GDP across the been steady and rising. This growth has been driven by among
African continent has been to a greater degree spurred by other factors cheaper infrastructure, wider geographical
increased deployment and subscription to GSM & 3G cellular penetration, cheaper handsets, competitive markets and
networks. Poor or non-existent copper/fibre and mesh networks, business models such as lower-rated community pay-cell
largely inefficient telecommunications management and/or phones, affordable prepaid cards and better credit facilities for
ineffective telecommunications policies in addition to poor
post-paid users. These factors, amongst others, have resulted in
infrastructure have made it nearly impossible to deliver essential
services in health, education, trade and industry etc. In this paper, a cellular boom in Africa accounting for about 7.2% of the
existing 3G high-speed packet networks is evaluated as an world’s total growth in the last decade. In spite of all this
alternative intervention to poor telecommunication infrastructure positive indications, there is still work to be done and lessons to
for the delivery of essential services such as telemedicine, be learnt as to determine how to harness this boom to push
emergency health services, tele-education and e-commerce in Africa’s development forward.
under-serviced areas. Simulation results show that HSDPA in
target areas with rural, hilly and remote urban environments Figure 1: Fixed Broadband Subscribers/100 people (2007)
meet QoS parameters in terms of bit rates that are well above the
minimum of 32kbps for a H.263 codec target bit-rate of 16kbps
video quality. The envisioned capacity satisfies the QoS
parameters for provision of essential services, if a distributed
centralized approach is adopted. 3G streaming can thus be used to
deliver essential services in under-serviced areas.

Index Terms — H.263/MPEG-4, HSDPA, UMTS, WCDMA

I. INTRODUCTION

W ith about 14% of the world’s population in Africa, less

than 2% of the world’s GDP, 25% of which is controlled
by South Africa alone and less than 2% of the 1.3 billion
odd fixed telephone lines worldwide, Africa is in dire need of
investment-intensive ICT infrastructure [9, 10, 11]. This
situation is exacerbated by prohibitive tariffs, poor
infrastructural development and low computer literacy levels.
Broadband penetration in Africa has been very low as shown in
Figure 1, with Africa accounting for less than 0.5% or about 1
million people of the entire continent’s population. This figure Source: World Telecommunications/ICT Indicators Database
is less than internet access which has had a better growth due to
sprouting cyber cafes. Success of broadband services in Africa from this scenario is
most likely achievable through wireless broadband access
especially via 3G/HSDPA and WiMAX technologies. Leading
this path of success is South Africa, where 3G subscribers
already outnumber ADSL subscribers, by 5 to 1. For instance
Manuscript submitted July 4, 2008. Otieno Amimo-Rayolla is with the Vodacom (SA) reported that above 10% of its 3G subscribers
French South African Technical Institute in Electronics (F’SATIE), Pretoria, used data cards for internet connections while Telkom SA has
South Africa (phone: +27 783 97 66 33; Amimo.Rayolla@fsatie.ac.za); deployed WiMAX in some high demand areas thus moving
Anish Kurien, is a senior lecturer with the Department of Electrical and
Elkectronics, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa.
from ‘classroom’ testing phase to commercial deployment [5].
(KurienAM@tut.ac.za). Dr. Marcel Odhiambo, is a senior lecturer with the The trend thus points to the popularity of 3G as a broadband
Department of Electrical and Mining, UNISA, Florida Campus, Johannesburg. access method. This trend is replicated in a number of countries
(OhangMO@unisa.ac.za )

978-0-7695-3453-4/08 $25.00 © 2008 IEEE 262

DOI 10.1109/BROADCOM.2008.61

Authorized licensed use limited to: Universidad de los Andes. Downloaded on January 28, 2010 at 17:07 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
across Africa from Morocco to Mauritius. Clearly, better
opportunity exists in the development of wireless options for
under-serviced Africa instead of fibre or copper; The challenge
lies in determining how to tap this potential and optimize it’s
uses to help lower cost of connectivity and deliver services to
the people of Africa and meet the WSIS’05 and ITU Connect
Africa/the world by 2015 initiatives while meeting the
Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) [10, 11]
Figure 2: Cellular Penetration in Selected African
Countries
Source: World Telecommunications/ICT Indicators Database
Figure 3: Cellular Subscription in Africa 2007 in Millions
Source: World Telecommunications/ICT Indicators Database
In meeting MDGs and bridging the digital gap, policy makers,
governments and telecommunications companies are faced
with hard choices; while the growth in the mobile sector has
soured and spurred economic development, broadband access
is still minimal. It still remains hard to tap into low income
earners if broadband prices are higher than prices of essential
commodities. Regulatory frameworks, insfrastructural
developments in roads and electricity to ensure wide reach and
that base stations are powered appropriately are just but some
of the challenges.
In meeting this broadband challenge, the available penetration
in cellular networks can be harnessed to help deliver essential
services to under-serviced areas of Africa. This can be highly
effective when initiatives such as community centres and The
Village Information and Communications Infrastructure
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(VICI) are developed while government offers cellular
operators tax rebates, waivers on imports and tax reductions to
local companies supplying renewable power and equipment to
mobile operators [4, 5]. With broadband, businesses can
videoconference with other offices, share real-time data with
customers and suppliers and process transactions online.
Health-care providers can improve the quality of care through
telemedicine links that connect patients and patient information
in rural areas with specialists at urban hospitals [11]. This paper
thus serves to explore video streaming as a viable broadband
service over existing 3G networks.
II. HIGH-SPEED DOWNLINK PACKET ACCESS - HSDPA
1. Background
HSDPA is a feature of UMTS Rel’5 that extends the features
of 3G in the downlink with a theoretical peak throughput of
14Mbs[24]. It is a shared channel transmission, with a
percentage (commonly 80%) of the total downlink radio
resource shared dynamically by users fundamentally in time
but also in the code domain. The code multiplexing is enabled
to effectively support small payloads and UEs that may not
de-spread the available 15 codes.
HSDPA introduces new features that enhance the 3G
primary radio bearer Downlink Shared Channel (DSCH).
These features include, a new transport channel High Speed -
DSCH (HS-DSCH) that acts as the new primary radio bearer,
Adaptive Modulation and Coding (AMC) for fast link
adaptation, fast Node B scheduling to control allocation of
channel rapidly, shorter Transmission Time Interval (TTI) to
improve latency, fast PHY layer Hybrid-ARQ with soft
combining for error control and multicode operations (fixed
SF=16) [8].
To achieve this, three features of WCDMA have been
removed, namely, fast power control, soft handoff and Variable
Spreading Factor (VSF), whereas the RNC remains unchanged
to provide ciphering and backup during handoffs or if some
other failure occurs by HARQ. The RNC-MAC is also
equipped with a new functionality that handles flow control and
backward compatibility with 2/3G. There is also a new
MAC-hs at the Node B to handle scheduling, HARQ related
functionality. These features are tightly coupled and permit a
per-TTI adaptation of the transmission parameters to the
instantaneous variations of the radio channel quality [23, 24].
2. Shared Channels
HSDPA is a shared channel resource, where HS-DSCH is
shared amongst users both in time and code dynamically by the
scheduler based on per TTI radio conditions of the UE. The
HS-DSCH is the primary radio bearer with a logical channel
structure that can be viewed as a pool of physical channels
(channelization codes, up to 15), the High Speed Physical
Downlink Shared Channels (HS-PDSCH). These channels
carry data to the UE from the Node B and maybe multiplexed in
code by the scheduler to different UE depending on channel
conditions or payload [1-3].
The High Speed Shared Control Channel (HS-SCCH) is a
physical signalling channel in the downlink used to set up
HS-PDSCH HARQ. Lastly the High Speed Dedicated Physical
Control Channel (HS-DPCCH) is a physical channel carrying
feedback from the UE in the uplink such as ACK/NACK and
Channel Quality Indicator (CQI) for ease of scheduling by the
Node B [1-3].
3. Fast Scheduling
Dynamic scheduling is perhaps the sole determinant of
HSDPA performance in a capacity limited network. The Node
B scheduler decides who receives what at every TTI together
with the link adaptation mechanism and at what data rate. The
scheduler utilizes multi-user diversity, defined as the gain
achieved by transmitting to users with higher C/I, and the cell
capacity maybe significantly enhanced by higher long-term
unfairness while observing QoS requirements i.e; The
scheduler may base decisions on predicted channel quality, the
current cell loading or the traffic priority class (real-time or
non-real-time services) or a combination of some or all the
above. It may be implemented as Proportional Fair (PF), Round
Robin (RR) or Maximum Carrier to Interference (CI) with a
total cell throughput of:
Nu
T =E Ri ,
i =1
For Nu users with a mean bit rate of Ri is given by [4, 8]
4. Hybrid ARQ
HARQ is used with soft combining i.e. if UE requests for a
retransmission of Transmission Blocks (TB) received in error;
it keeps the soft copy of the TB received in error and combines
it with the subsequent retransmission to improve on the
probability of successful decoding. HARQ always uses a Stop
and Wait (SAW) mechanism. It further helps to fine tune
effective code rates and compensates for the errors made by the
link adaptation mechanism. It can be implemented either as
chase combining, where the retransmitted TB is the exact copy
of the first transmission or as Incremental Redundancy (IR),
where the retransmission has parity bits not in the original TB.
5. Fast Link Adaptation
In circuit switched systems (CS) , services such as voice,
have mostly constant bit rates. It is therefore necessary to
implement fast closed loop power to maintain constant bit
energy to Noise (Eb/N0) and combat fading. However, in
bursty data traffic that can tolerate jitter, the same objective of
constant Eb/No can be achieved by keeping the transmission
power constant and adjusting the data rate. This adjustment is
easily achieved by the scheduling mechanism and the
modulation scheme. The scheduler shares the channel resource
based on the channel conditions (which are independent) of
individual UEs.
The channel coding rate is therefore adjusted and a suitable
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modulation scheme Quadrature Phase Shift Keying (QPSK) or
16-QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) chosen based on
the channel conditions [Fig. 2]. The MAC-hs selects the MCS
that match the instantaneous radio conditions which selection
depends on the CQI, instantaneous power of the associated
dedicated physical channel, QoS demands of the requested
service and waiting buffer sizes.
Links with better channel conditions are assigned 16QAM
and higher coding rates. This ensures higher throughput, low
interference variation and high effectiveness in combination
with fat pipe scheduling [22, 23, 24]
III. SIMULATIONS
To simulate video traffic over broadband wireless networks,
a suitable streaming model must be formulated. Often,
streaming servers emit traffic with infinitesimal silence periods
in between the transmission blocks. There also exists
significant correlation between and amongst the data units in
streamed traffic. Usually, traffic on the air interface is likely to
experience self-similarity effect since in all likelihood it
remains bursty on diverse time scales. It is thus necessary to
come up with a model that ensures the following:
1. The client receives, fairly, the same quality video under
(1) changing network conditions
2. One or a few clients do not utilize the entire bandwidth
at the expense of other network users and
3. The streamed video is compatible with client equipment
for viewing.
The streaming traffic may be modelled in a variety of ways:
It could be as a Constant Bit Rate (CBR) source with the bit rate
is specified, as a Variable bit rate (VBR) source -
autoregressive model, a VBR source - wavelet model or a VBR
source using the Fractional - Autoregressive Integrated Moving
Average model (F-ARIMA). Autoregressive models produce
traffic with an exponentially decaying auto-correlation
function. They are therefore unable to match the marginal
empirical distribution of the trace being modelled. This calls for
further measures such as distorting the marginal distribution
function of the generated traces so as match the empirical traces
more closely. In this case, the CBR models were used [20, 25].
1. NS2 Set-up
Simulations were conducted in the NS2 environment since it
is easily available and the source files can be refined to suit the
needs of your simulations. The UMTS patch from EURANE
was used to mimic a 3G network under NS2. Two more patches
for UDP-MPEG traffic and Evalvid_RTP were used to assist
with video streaming and timing and eventual evaluation of
metrics. H.263/MPEG-4 empirical traces generated by Evalvild
(Dr. Cheng-Han Lin) and by the Technical University of Berlin.
The traces used have a codec expected stream-rate of 64kbps
[13-17]
The UEs were modelled as community centres (VICI) and
264
 taking into account limited resources and coverage; each It’s important to note that Evaluate Program (ET) program is
cell-site was given 5 centres at 750 meters from Node-B. These NOT part of NS2 environment and since we are only interested
centres could be run as separate entities or simply as entities in bandwidth issues, delay, loss and jitter parts of the Evalvid
within a single complex. A loading factor of 0.8 was assigned that deal with RTPplay and reconstruction for QoS are omitted.
for HSDPA with voice and other signalling taking the
remaining 20% of 3G resources. Five different environments
were looked at; Hilly, Indoor, Pedestrian, Rural and Urban. IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Urban was included to underlie the fact that there are places in Figure 6 shows the end to end average throughput achieved
Africa that are classified as urban or have urban characteristics for the different environments.
but are under-serviced. Finally, because the Matlab pre-process
for getting the channel conditions for user equipment (UE) Figure 6: End-to-End Average Throughput
could not accept values below 3kmph, an average of 3kmph is
assumed for all scenarios. This speed is low enough to be
stationary and fast enough to course negligible effects due to
Doppler effects.

2. 3G/HSDPA Network Abstraction

The simulation network model is based on the UMTS system
architecture. The UEs are the streaming clients and a fixed host
(internet) plays the role of streaming server. The figure below
shows the 3G/HSDPA network as abstracted [18-21].

Figure 4: UMTS/HSDPA Simulation Network Model

UE0 From Figure 6, it is evident that the scenario with the best
performance is Rural with above 50kbps. This would require a
DPCH/HS-DSCH
playout buffer with about 1 to 2 seconds delay to successfully
UE1
DPCH/
HS- NodeB
622Mbs
0.2ms
RNC
622Mbs
0.4ms
SGSN
622Mbs
10ms
SGSN
stream video traffic without the fear of buffer underun.
DSCH
Overall, the average rate assuming the 5 UEs were distributed
DPCH/HS-DSCH
10Mbs 15ms
across the 5 different environments simultaneously would be
about 40kbps. This figure is still within the 2 second playout
UE2
Host buffer delay to achive our target streaming rate and hence QoS.
Streaming
Client
Streaming If we use IP target rates of 28kbps as commonly used in internet
Server
streaming then with the exception of Urban environments all
other scenarios would meet such QoS requirements. They all
3. NS2 Simulation Model stream above 32kbps.
The NS2 simulation framework is as shown in Figure 5 below.
Figure 7 shows the end-to-end average delay experienced for
Figure 5: UMTS/HSDPA Simulation Network Model the different environments.
Traffic NS2
Network
Environment
Trace Trace File
myTrafficTrace
Receiver Figure 7: End-to-End Delay
Trace File

Parser (VLC Sender

H.263/MPEG Trace File
then
encoder
RTPdump) myUDP myUDPSink

Raw YUV
Video Source Simulation Network Sink

Experience Network Delay & Packet Loss

Evaluate Trace – ET

Acquire Throughput,
Packet/Frame Loss;
rate, Delay & Jitter

myEvalvid_RTP

(Source, myEvalvid RTP)

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From Figure 7, ‘Urban’ has the highest end-to-end delay of up
to 2 minutes while ‘Rural’ has the lowest average delay of
fairly below 2seconds. The delay graphs break rise sharply that
could signify an increase in interference and unfavourable
channel conditions.
Analysis of average delay for all scenarios reveals, Rural =
2.61746s, Indoor = 17.9497s, Urban = 78.0558s, Hilly =
29.7854s and Pedestrian = 27.6048s. These values represent
worse case scenarios and a good design of playout buffers is
thus necessary to implement streaming over these
environments.
Figure 8 shows the end-to-end delay jitter experienced for the
different environments.
Figure 8: End-to-End Delay Jitter
Jitter is highest in ‘Urban’ environments followed by ‘Hilly’
areas which is consistent with levels of interference and clutter.
The highest spikes seen in the graph with the sharpest delay
were experienced in ‘Urban’ environment about 30sec after
simulations has started. However, the rise is sharp which
signals an acute disturbance in streaming activity.
V. CONCLUSION
3G/HSDPA is an appropriate technology that can be
optimized for sustained streaming services in the remote rural
environments where expertise is away in big cities or beyond. It
has also been shown that streaming rates that meet the QoS
parameters are achievable with good buffering technology. It is
therefore possible to stream valuable video material such as
medical procedures which could be viewed by physicians in
specialized fields and working in cities far away from the
places lacking skilled medical personnel or educational
programmes for students in villages or research centres in
outposts.
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