Seamless Multimedia Communications in Heterogeneous Mobile Access Networks

With the advent of the new wireless technologies allowing for higher data rates, the provision of high quality multimedia services over the upcoming wireless and mobile networks is gaining momentum. These future mobile networks are witnessed to consist of a variety of heterogeneous wireless access technologies connected to a high-speed IP datagram-based core network. The heterogeneity of these networks in terms of network capacity and terminal capabilities among others, is expected to cause an unpredictably capacity-changing network scenario. In these scenarios, the network-layer QoS mechanisms cannot guarantee a stable service because most of the variability is due to the wireless channel itself. Thus, the use of adaptive applications being able to change their settings to adapt to the available network resources is a must. We introduce a new paradigm of useraware adaptive applications being able to intelligently maintain a good user-perceived QoS even when the network conditions are highly variable. We will show empirical results which demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to outperform traditional multimedia internetworking applications even in extremely variable scenarios such as ad hoc networks.