Guaranteeing quality of service in mobile radio networks by means of link adaptation algorithms

Link adaptation has been proven to be an efficient technique to enhance the performance of mobile communication systems. The design of link adaptation has mainly concentrated on improving throughput performance. Although this design strategy can be considered appropriate for best effort services, multimedia services have important constraints in terms of transmission delay and error rates that can be tolerated without considerable degradation in the quality of service that the user might experience. In this context, this paper presents link adaptation algorithms that are able to control the experienced error rate and also to trade-off between throughput and error rate. The proposed algorithms are evaluated for real-time H.263 video transmissions in a packet-switched mobile radio network based on the GPRS standard.