Ultra-HD Video Streaming in 5G Fixed Wireless Access Bottlenecks

5G Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) is an enabling technology in intelligent systems (IS) that may provide Ultra-HD (UHD) video streaming services with high Quality of Experience (QoE) in a small business use case setting. However, UHD streaming over 5G FWA is difficult in terms of latency and dependability due to numerous network factors. Due to this there may be multiple video players competing for network resources when streaming a UHD video. To date there has been very little work of 5G ‘last mile access’ streaming over bottleneck FWA Local Area Networks (LANs) under congested network conditions. The bottleneck link is the 5G FWA gateway. In these networks viewers may get sub-optimal QoE. Adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms are used to select the near optimal bitrates during a streaming session. To obtain the QoE of viewers in 5G FWA bottleneck networks we study the performance of four DASH-based adaptive video streaming algorithms (MPC, BOLA, Oboe and Pensive). BOLA performs the best and Pensive the worst. However, BOLA’s overall performance is sub-optimal. This work supports the need for developing new ABR algorithms for the 5G FWA environment.

Towards Enhanced Mobile Broadband Communications: A Tutorial on Enabling Technologies, Design Considerations, and Prospects of 5G and beyond Fixed Wireless Access Networks

There has been a growing interconnection across the world owing to various multimedia applications and services. Fixed wireless access (FWA) is an attractive wireless solution for delivering multimedia services to different homes. With the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond mobile networks, the FWA performance can be enhanced significantly. However, their implementation will present different challenges on the transport network due to the incessant increase in the number of required cell-sites and the subsequent increase in the per-site requirements. This paper presents a comprehensive tutorial on the enabling technologies, design considerations, requirements, and prospects of broadband schemes. Furthermore, the related technical challenges of FWA are reviewed, and we proffer potential solutions to address them. Besides, we review various transport network options that can be employed for FWA deployment. In this regard, we offer an in-depth discussion on their related requirements for different use cases. Moreover, we give an insight into the 3GPP RAN functional split implementations and implications on the 5G FWA transport network solutions. The concepts of virtualized RANs for attending flexibly to the dynamic nature of different use cases are also presented.