Performance of a link control protocol for local wireless multimedia communications

The convergence of wireless communications and multimedia services throws open interesting research topics to address. The variety of media-specific QoS requirements and the maintenance of synchronization among different streams to be presented at the receiver in multimedia applications demand additional functionalities at the data link layer. In this paper, we present an approach for efficient link control and management of multimedia applications in next generation wireless networks. We advocate the use of multiple connections, one for each traffic component of the application, as an effective solution for transport of multimedia applications over wireless. The effectiveness of this scheme is guaranteed by providing a new link control technique that works on top of a PRMA-type access protocol and jointly manages different streams of a multimedia application. We show that the proposed scheme performs well, especially during periods in which the system traffic load is high, and reacts well to degradation of multimedia service quality, both in terms of QoS parameters and synchronization of its traffic components.