Middleware-level QoS differentiation in the wireless Internet: the ubiQoS solution for audio streaming over Bluetooth

The ultimate goal of mobile and ubiquitous Internet accessibility is not only the seamless integration of wireless devices with traditional fixed networks but also the dynamic differentiation of quality of service (QoS) levels depending on client characteristics. In this context, the paper presents the provisioning of audio streaming with different QoS levels in the application-level ubiQoS middleware. In particular, it focuses on how ubiQoS manages the QoS over the last segment of the audio distribution path towards Bluetooth clients by allocating different types of Bluetooth communication channels (unicast connection-oriented or broadcast connectionless) depending on the differentiated QoS requirements of different user classes. To this purpose, we have developed a library that extends the JSR82 standard with the support of active slave broadcast, thus simplifying the Java-based management of Bluetooth communications. The reported experimental results show the feasibility of our application-level middleware approach in the challenging case of audio streaming with differentiated QoS to resource-limited Bluetooth devices.