Recent Advances and Challenges in Wireless QoE-aware Multimedia Streaming Systems

It is expected that multimedia applications will be the most abundant application in the Internet and thousands of new wireless and mobile users will produce and share multimedia streaming content ubiquitously. In this multimedia-aware system, it is important to assure the end-to-end quality level support for video and voice applications in wireless systems. Traditional Quality of Service (QoS) techniques assure the delivery of those services with packet differentiation assurance and indicate the impact of multimedia traffic only on the network performance, however, they do not reflect the user’s perception. Recent advances in multimedia are exploring new Quality of Experience (QoE) approaches and including metrics and control schemes in wireless networking systems in order to increase the user ́s satisfaction and optimize network resources. QoE-based operations can be used as an indicator of how a networking environment meets the end-user’s needs and new assessment and packet control approaches are still important challenges. This chapter presents an overview of the most recent advances and challenges in assessment and traffic conditioner procedures for wireless multimedia streaming systems. In addition, an intelligent packet dropper mechanism for IEEE 802.11e systems is proposed and evaluated by using the Network Simulator 2 (NS2) and Evalvid Tool.