Cross-layer wireless multimedia transmission: challenges, principles, and new paradigms

Wireless networks are poised to enable a variety of existing and emerging multimedia streaming applications. As the use of wireless local area networks spreads beyond simple data transfer to bandwidth-intense, delay-sensitive, and loss-tolerant multimedia applications, addressing quality of service...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE wireless communications 2005-08, Vol.12 (4), p.50-58
Main Authors: van Der Schaar, M., Sai Shankar N
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Energy consumption
LAN interconnection
Multimedia
Multimedia systems
Open systems
Optimization
Power consumption
Power system interconnection
Power system protection
Quality of service
Spreads
Stations
Strategy
Streaming media
Tradeoffs
Wireless communication
Wireless communications
Wireless LAN
Wireless networks
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Summary:Wireless networks are poised to enable a variety of existing and emerging multimedia streaming applications. As the use of wireless local area networks spreads beyond simple data transfer to bandwidth-intense, delay-sensitive, and loss-tolerant multimedia applications, addressing quality of service issues become extremely important. Currently, a multitude of protection and adaptation strategies exists in the different layers of the open systems interconnection (OSI) stack. Hence, an in-depth understanding and comparative evaluation of these strategies are necessary to effectively assess and enable the possible trade-offs in multimedia quality, power consumption, implementation complexity, and spectrum utilization that are provided by the various OSI layers. This further opens the question of cross-layer optimization and its effectiveness in providing an improved solution with respect to the above trade-offs. In this article we formalize the cross-layer problem, discuss its challenges, and present several possible solutions. Moreover, we also discuss the impact the cross-layer optimization strategy deployed at one station has on the multimedia performance of other stations. We introduce a new fairness concept for wireless multimedia systems that employs different cross-layer strategies, and show its advantages when compared to existing resource allocation mechanisms used in wireline communications. Finally, we propose a new paradigm for wireless communications based on competition, which allows wireless stations to harvest additional resources or free up resources as well as optimally and dynamically adapt their cross-layer transmission strategies to improve multimedia quality and/or power consumption.
ISSN:1536-1284
1558-0687
DOI:10.1109/MWC.2005.1497858