The prevalence of multimedia applications has drastically increased the amount of multimedia data. With the drop of the hardware cost, more and more mobile devices with higher capacities are now used. The widely deployed wireless LAN and broadband wireless networks provide the ubiquitous network access for multimedia applications. Provision of Quality of Service (QoS) is challenging in mobile ad hoc networks because of the dynamic characteristics of mobile networks and the limited resources of the mobile devices. The wireless network is not reliable due to node mobility, multi-access channel and multi-hop communication. In this paper, we provide a survey of QoS provision in mobile multimedia, addressing the technologies at different network layers and cross-layer design. This paper focuses on the QoS techniques over IEEE 802.11e networks. We also provide some thoughts about the challenges and directions for future research.

/pdf/quality-of-service-provision-in-mobile-multimedia-a-survey-2zsonzcfmp.pdf

Quality of service provision in mobile multimedia - a survey

Visual sensor networks (VSNs) comprised of battery-operated electronic devices endowed with low-resolution cameras have expanded the applicability of a series of monitoring applications. Those types of sensors are interconnected by ad hoc error-prone wireless links, imposing stringent restrictions on available bandwidth, end-to-end delay and packet error rates. In such context, multimedia coding is required for data compression and error-resilience, also ensuring energy preservation over the path(s) toward the sink and improving the end-to-end perceptual quality of the received media. Cross-layer optimization may enhance the expected efficiency of VSNs applications, disrupting the conventional information flow of the protocol layers. When the inner characteristics of the multimedia coding techniques are exploited by cross-layer protocols and architectures, higher efficiency may be obtained in visual sensor networks. This paper surveys recent research on multimedia-based cross-layer optimization, presenting the proposed strategies and mechanisms for transmission rate adjustment, congestion control, multipath selection, energy preservation and error recovery. We note that many multimedia-based cross-layer optimization solutions have been proposed in recent years, each one bringing a wealth of contributions to visual sensor networks.

A Survey on Multimedia-Based Cross-Layer Optimization in Visual Sensor Networks

In recent years, the ubiquity of multimedia services along with the proliferation of mobile devices and the demand for new audio and video applications are changing the life style of users. User demands for multimedia access anywhere, anytime from any device are creating new challenges for research communities from both academia and industry. It is expected that video-based services alone will account for 50 percent of all consumer network traffic in 2012 and we will continue to witness the explosive growth in users sharing multimedia content over the Internet. In this context, new network, application, and user-based approaches must be created to deal with such complex multimedia systems. This paper presents some of the recent advances in multimedia networking focusing primarily on areas that have been receiving attention recently and are expected to continue to generate further interests in coming years. These areas include Quality of Experience (QoE) and various related standardization issues, Content Distribution Networks (CDNs), multimedia communications, mobile Multimedia. This paper also briefly highlights some of the major challenges that still need to be addressed to enable the support and delivery of multimedia services anywhere, anytime over highly heterogeneous infrastructures and user terminal devices.

/pdf/recent-advances-in-multimedia-networking-16tknie7rr.pdf

Recent advances in multimedia networking

This paper proposed an IPB-frame Adaptive Mapping Mechanism (AMM) to improve the video transmission quality over IEEE 802.11e Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Based on the frame structure of hierarchical coding technology, the probability of each frame allocated to the most appropriate Access Category (AC) was dynamically updated according to its importance and traffic load of each AC. Simulation results showed the superior performance of the proposed AMM by comparing with three other existing mechanisms in terms of three objective metrics.

/pdf/ipb-frame-adaptive-mapping-mechanism-for-video-transmission-5bvohp68or.pdf

Ipb-frame adaptive mapping mechanism for video transmission over IEEE 802.11e WLANs

The H.264 video compression technique enjoys the merit of good video quality with high compression rate; therefore, it has been widely applied in delivering video content. In IEEE 802.11ac wireless local area networks, enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) is the primarily adopted access control mechanism for multimedia traffic transmission. However, the performance is degraded due to the unpredictable delay caused by its inefficient backoff procedure. To achieve high quality of service/experience, this paper proposes a multipolling controlled access (MPCA) scheme to guarantee the latency in delivering important video frames while reducing transmission overhead. We also propose a cross-layer designed quality adjustment strategy to maximize the visual experience. Furthermore, the downlink multiuser multiple-input–multiple-output feature in IEEE 802.11ac is exploited to enhance the reliability of MPCA. Theoretical analysis is provided to show high efficiency of MPCA. Simulation results indicate that MPCA has higher throughput, lower packet delay, lower packet loss, and higher peak signal-to-noise ratio than the EDCA.

QoS/QoE Support for H.264/AVC Video Stream in IEEE 802.11ac WLANs

The use of wireless networks has spread further than simple data transfer to delay sensitive and loss tolerant multimedia applications. Over the past few years, wireless multimedia transmission across Wireless Local area Networks (WLANs) has gained a lot of attention because of the introduction of technologies such as Bluetooth, IEEE 802.11, 3G, and WiMAX. The IEEE 802.11 WLAN has become a dominating technology due to its low cost and ease of implementation. But, transmitting video over WLANs in real time remains a challenge because it imposes strong demands on video codec, the underlying network, and the Media Access Control (MAC) layer. This paper presents a cross-layer mapping algorithm to improve the quality of transmission of H.264 (a recently-developed video coding standard of the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group) video stream over IEEE 802.11e-based wireless networks. The major goals of H.264 standard were on improving the rate distortion and the enhanced compression performance. Our proposed cross-layer design involves the mapping of H.264 video slices (packets) to appropriate access categories of IEEE 802.11e according to their information significance. We evaluate the performance of our proposed cross-layer design and the results obtained demonstrate its effectiveness in exploiting characteristics of the MAC and application layers to improve the video transmission quality.

Giovanni Giambene

Papers

Wireless multimedia delivery over 802.11e with cross-layer optimization techniques