Musaq: A Multimedia Session-Aware Qos Provisioning Scheme For Cellular Networks

Networked multimedia applications involve a set of cooperating streams that together form a multimedia session. Existing QoS provisioning schemes for multimedia applications in cellular networks either allow composite streams to compete with one another for resources or else provide QoS to a session as an atomic entity, leaving to the application the task of managing QoS for the individual streams. The main contribution of this work is to propose a novel local QoS provisioning scheme for cellular networks that is aware of the relationships between the streams that compose a session. Our new Multimedia Session-Aware QoS (MUSAQ) provisioning scheme manages the QoS of the individual streams in a session, and, with the knowledge of their relationships, it prevents destructive competition between the streams. Further, by allowing application-specified prioritization between streams in a session, MUSAQ features a significant improvement in performance over session-unaware schemes. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.