Meeting demands of mobile Internet applications

The mobile Internet will be used to serve a wide variety of applications with very different bandwidth requirements, usage patterns, and mobility models. To allow the wireless infrastructure to support services from text base messaging to real-time multimedia requires balancing QoS across all elements of the system from the Internet to the mobile. In the wired world, user connections to the network are reliable and stable and QoS is largely accomplished by adaptively apportioning traffic loads across network elements. In contrast, user connections in wireless networks are inherently unstable and unreliable due to radio frequency interference and fading. In third generation wireless systems (3G), advanced channel coding, rapid power control and error correcting Radio Link Protocols allow 3G radio links to achieve "wire-like" throughput and bit error rates, but they will still be very "un-wire-like" in terms of latency and channel rate variability. The link level characteristics of 3G systems will have a great impact on QoS for mobile Internet users. Here we report results of experiments using real Internet applications to assess the effects of high latency and throughput variability that will occur in third generation (3G) wireless networks.