Cross-layer aware packetization strategies for optimized wireless multimedia transmission

The concepts and techniques that have dominated wired multimedia communications are not well suited for dynamic wireless environments. In recent years, research focus has been to adapt existing algorithms and protocols to the rapidly varying resources of wireless networks. For instance, packetization strategies are solely designed based on application layer information. While this design provides adequate support for multimedia applications over the Internet, it results often in poor performance in crowded wireless networks, when the interference is high or when the stations are mobile. In this paper, we show that by deploying a cross-layer aware packetization strategy, which explicitly considers the deployed compression techniques and content characteristics at the application layer as well as the protection methods at the lower layers for different channel conditions, significant improvements in multimedia performance can be obtained.