A QoS architecture to support streaming applications in the mobile environment

The Internet is fast emerging as the ubiquitous transport network to provide multimedia services. A number of multimedia services, notably streaming applications, are growing in popularity. There is an increasing need to support such applications for mobile terminals, which access the Internet over wireless access networks. However, it is a challenging task to provide streaming services in mobile environments due to the rapidly changing path characteristics, disruption in service resulting from hand-off, and retransmission delay to recover from wireless errors. Mobile terminals have very limited buffering and processing power due to power and size constraints. Hence, without any built-in network support, it is not possible for mobile terminals to adapt in such environments at the application layer. We propose a QoS architecture for wireless access networks that enables mobile terminals to receive a constant quality streaming service.