Multi-Service Wireless Internet Link Enhancements

Abstract

The deployment of several real-time multimedia applications over the Internet has motivated a considerable research effort on the provision of multiple services on the Internet. In order to extend this work over wireless links however, we must also take into account the performance limitations of wireless media. We survey various related approaches and conclude that link layer schemes provide a universal and localized solution. Based on simulations of application performance over many link layer schemes we show that different approaches work best for different applications. We present a multi-service link layer architecture which enhances the performance of diverse applications by concurrently supporting multiple link layer schemes. Simulations of multiple applications executing simultaneously show that this approach dramatically improves performance for all of them. We finally consider embedding this approach into a Quality of Service oriented Internet, discussing the traditional best-effort architecture, the Differentiated Services architecture and an advanced dynamic service discovery architecture.