Enhancing multimedia streaming over existing wireless LAN technology using the Unified Link Layer API

摘要

This paper examines how multimedia streaming scenarios can be enhanced by cross-layer interaction, and in particular link performance information and configuration options provided by the recently developed Unified Link Layer API (ULLA). It provides results of an experimental implementation developed for this purpose in a wireless LAN (WLAN) environment. Multimedia streaming is an application that is gaining in popularity for mobile devices and in particular mobile Internet-based content broadcasting is rapidly emerging as a key feature on mobile devices. In these scenarios, the wireless link (last hop) is normally the performance bottleneck due to the dynamic and limited capacity of the wireless medium. The use of ULLA in this context can provide the ability to tailor the video transmission to the wireless link performance and also to configure the links in response to performance problems or environmental changes. For this purpose the focus of multimedia streaming has been on WLAN link technology and dynamic adaptation (i.e., dynamic channel selection and video transcoding) using a dynamic resource reservation overlay protocol. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.