QoS provisioning in wireless multimedia networks

The advent of powerful hand-held computers and the desire for communication on the move, are the driving forces behind an emerging technology called mobile computing. Observing the growing demands of roaming users, it has been predicted that the next generation wireless networks will be burdened with the bandwidth-intensive traffic generated by personal multimedia applications. However, the available bandwidth for supporting these applications is still limited, and therefore its proper management is necessary to ensure the required quality of service (QoS) provisioning between the end-systems. We first present a survey of the existing literature on the QoS provisioning for wireless networks, which mainly focus on identifying the technological bottlenecks involved. Then we propose a unified framework to provide a link layer as well as a network layer solution for QoS provisioning. Our framework measures two important QoS parameters, namely the inter-packet delay and the transmission data rate. Experimental results show as high as a 21% improvement in the call admission probability and about a 16% improvement in the hand-off call dropping probability.