MobiWeb: enabling adaptive continuous media applications over 3G wireless links

MobiWeb is a proxy-based network architecture designed to enhance the performance of adaptive real-time streams over 3G wireless links. MobiWeb includes a priority scheme that preserves media smoothness despite short-term fluctuations of the link, as well as an adaptation mechanism applied to streams responding to long-term link changes and handoffs. A set of timers permits the rapid exploration of the link, increasing the utilization of resources when they are abundant, while forcing enhanced streams to back off to more moderate resource usage when resources are scarce. MobiWeb uses admission control for real-time traffic in order to provide a base level of quality, while remaining transparent to unaware best-effort traffic. This article validates the enhanced performance of adaptive real-time streams when MobiWeb is used through the evaluation of several scenarios simulated on NS-the Network Simulator tool.