Wireless Heterogeneous Networks and Next Generation Internet

The recent advances in wireless access technologies as well as the increasing number of mobile applications have made Wireless Internet a reality. A wide variety of bandwidth demanding services including high speed data delivery and multimedia communication have been materialized through the convergence of the next generation Internet and heterogeneous wireless networks. However, providing even higher bandwidth and richer applications necessitates a fundamental understanding of wireless Internet architecture and the interactions between heterogeneous users. Consequently, fundamental advances in many concepts of the wireless Internet are required for the ultimate goal of communication anytime anywhere. This special issue of the ACM Mobile Networks and Applications Journal is dedicated to the recent advances in the area of Wireless Internet. We accepted 10 papers out of 59 submissions from all over the world with a 17% acceptance rate. Papers describing management schemes, protocols, models, evaluation methods, and experimental studies of Wireless Internet are included in this special issue to provide a broad view of recent advances in this field

A Dynamic Multimedia User-Weight Classification Scheme for IEEE_802.11 WLANs

In this paper we expose a dynamic traffic-classification scheme to support multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Obviously, over a Wi-Fi link and to better serve these applications - which normally have strict bounded transmission delay or minimum link rate requirement - a service differentiation technique can be applied to the media traffic transmitted by the same mobile node using the well-known 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) protocol. However, the given EDCA mode does not offer user differentiation, which can be viewed as a deficiency in multi-access wireless networks. Accordingly, we propose a new inter-node priority access scheme for IEEE 802.11e networks which is compatible with the EDCA scheme. The proposed scheme joins a dynamic user-weight to each mobile station depending on its outgoing data, and therefore deploys inter-node priority for the channel access to complement the existing EDCA inter-frame priority. This provides efficient quality of service control across multiple users within the same coverage area of an access point. We provide performance evaluations to compare the proposed access model with the basic EDCA 802.11 MAC protocol mode to elucidate the quality improvement achieved for multimedia communication over 802.11 WLANs.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications (IJCNC

Improving the performance of SCTP Transport Protocol over wireless networks

[Abstract]: Stream Control Transmission Protocol(SCTP) is a reliable transport protocol combining the advantages of TCP and UDP. SCTP has many desirable features including multihoming, multistreaming, and partial data reliability. These features have made SCTP perform much more effectively in multimedia networking applications. They have also worked better in wireless environment which traditional transport protocols are ineffective and cumbersome. Before the transmission, an application using SCTP needs to establish an association between the client and the server. The establishment of association requires a number which will be used to create multiple streams. However, SCTP has not specified a method or suggested any ideas of determine the number. In our paper, we focus on the performance of SCTP protocol over the wireless networks. The ideas is to extend the SCTP with a process of determining an optimal number prior to the association establishing. We examine the modified SCTP on a simulated wireless networks, and the experiment results of simulation using NS2 have shown the modified SCTP is feasible and also demonstrated the modified SCTP’s superiority of performance over TCP and UDP over the wireless networks

A flexible medium access control framework for multimedia application support in wireless ATM

Includes bibliographical references.The field of wireless communications has seen phenomenal development over the last decade. With the current abundance of applications that use broadband multimedia over wired networks it is logical that users will want to have access to these same multimedia streams [rom a mobile terminal. Wireless solutions for connectivity to networks such as Ethernet networks already exist, however, a method of supporting access to an ATM network from a mobile terminal has not yet been standardised. Transporting ATM data over the wireless medium poses a number of problems. The Medium Access Control (MAC) layer of any proposed wireless ATM network would be responsible for resolving many of these problems. Unfortunately, research into MAC layers is hampered by the fact that most existing MAC layers cannot be modified in order to experiment with the effectiveness of the many MAC protocol techniques that exist

Performance of an adaptive multimedia mechanism in a wireless multi-user environment

With the increasing popularity of accessing multimedia services over different wireless networks, researchers have been trying to develop different adaptive multimedia mechanisms in order to mitigate the impact of fluctuating radio resources. This paper considers the case when multiple users stream video over the same IEEE 802.11b WLAN using a newly proposed Signal Strength-based Adaptive Multimedia Delivery Mechanism (SAMMy). SAMMy makes use of the IEEE 802.11k standard and uses estimated signal strength, location, and packet loss as part of its adaptive mechanism in order to increase user perceived quality for multimedia streaming applications in wireless networks. SAMMy is evaluated by modeling and simulations and compared with another adaptive multimedia delivery mechanism TFRC, in terms of aggregate throughput and fairness. The results show that the proposed signal strengthbased adaptive multimedia delivery scheme outperforms the other scheme in terms of both throughput and fairness when performing video streaming in WLAN

Multicast broadcast services support in OFDMA-based WiMAX systems [Advances in mobile multimedia]

Multimedia stream service provided by broadband wireless networks has emerged as an important technology and has attracted much attention. An all-IP network architecture with reliable high-throughput air interface makes orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA)-based mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (mobile WiMAX) a viable technology for wireless multimedia services, such as voice over IP (VoIP), mobile TV, and so on. One of the main features in a WiMAX MAC layer is that it can provide'differentiated services among different traffic categories with individual QoS requirements. In this article, we first give an overview of the key aspects of WiMAX and describe multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) architecture of the 3GPP. Then, we propose a multicast and broadcast service (MBS) architecture for WiMAX that is based on MBMS. Moreover, we enhance the MBS architecture for mobile WiMAX to overcome the shortcoming of limited video broadcast performance over the baseline MBS model. We also give examples to demonstrate that the proposed architecture can support better mobility and offer higher power efficiency

Transporting audio over wireless ad hoc networks: Experiments & new insights

Current efforts on ad hoc wireless network research are focused more on routing and multicasting protocols. However, there is an increasing need to understand what sort of media could be transported over wireless ad hoc networks other than data. Existing research on multimedia wireless communications often addresses broadband wireless networks with a connection-oriented backbone. In this paper, we address the possibility of transporting audio traffic over wireless ad hoc networks. We examine the impact of wireless multi-hop links on audio data relay and how the audio quality at the receiver is affected. In particular, we examine communication parameters such as latency, jitter, packet loss, and their impact on perceived audio quality. ©2003 IEEE.published_or_final_versio