In a wireless environment, due to topology changes and characteristics of media (interference in radio signals) the bandwidth of a link is unpredictable and possibly very low, the error rates are variable and extremely high. Provisioning and guaranteeing quality of service (QoS) in such an environment is a very challenging problem. In this paper we propose an adaptive and QoS framework to support multimedia applications in a wireless networking environment. The proposed framework is hierarchical in nature with cluster of mobile end hosts connected to a base station, base stations are connected to a supervisory node, which in turn is connected to the wired infrastructure. The changing conditions in wireless due to interference and possibly mobility, entitle that the real-time applications needing stringent QoS should be adaptable. The framework uses a generic feedback mechanism to support adaptability at all layers of the wireless network. An overview of existing wireless architectures which support QoS is given. The architectures discussed are WAMIS (wireless adaptive multimedia information system), SWAN (seamless wireless ATM network), MMWN (multimedia support for mobile wireless networks), and QGMC (QoS guarantees in mobile computing). The proposed approach is compared with these existing methods.
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