A hierarchical QoS framework for wireless multimedia network

With the rapid growth of wireless networks, wireless multimedia services are expected to be widely deployed in the near future. But wireless multimedia delivery is facing numerous challenges, e.g., in a dynamic and error-prone wireless environment, the packet drop rates are extremely high because lossy wireless channels are variable and unpredictable. For high bit rates multimedia transfer over wireless network of limited variable bandwidth and high loss ratio, the guarantee of QoS requirement is a more challenging work. In this paper, a new hierarchical QoS framework for wireless multimedia network is presented, which combining adaptive FEC (forward error correction), ARQ-SR (automatic repeat request selective repeat) and TCP-friendly rate control scheme in different layers. The adaptive FEC schemes tune the number of packet transmission according to the wireless link error condition obtained from the ARQ feedback. TCP-friendly rate control schemes tune the sending rate according to the wireless link congestion condition. The simulation results verified that our proposed QoS framework can be fit for the dynamic wireless network and improve the quality of multimedia delivery.