Cross-layer multimedia quality enforcement through user aware information in wireless networks

Abstract

Quality assessment of multimedia traffic is a hot topic. In this paper we present a Multimedia Management System, which can be used on-line to assess and guarantee the quality of multimedia traffic in a wired and wireless network. The proposed platform uses both network and application layer metrics to build up a scalable quality assessment framework. The core of this framework provides means for traffic provisioning capabilities by coordinating the network access and usage both from the wireless node and from the network access point. These two combined features permit our platform to guarantee a satisfactory multimedia user experience. We evaluate our proposal by issuing an experimental deployment in a testbed and performing a series of tests under different network situations to demonstrate the Quality of Experience guaranties of our system. The results show that the quality of video perceived by endusers is considerably improved compared to the typical wireless network.