IEEE Wireless Communications · 2005 · 522 citations · 17 references
Wireless CommunicationsCross-layer OptimizationEngineeringEdge ComputingMultimedia NetworkWireless NetworksOpen Systems InterconnectionMultimedia DeliveryCross-layer DesignMultimedia QualityWireless Multimedia SystemNew Paradigms
Wireless networks are poised to support a growing range of bandwidth‑intensive, delay‑sensitive, and loss‑tolerant multimedia streaming applications, making quality‑of‑service management across the OSI stack increasingly critical. This study aims to systematically evaluate cross‑layer protection and adaptation strategies, assess their trade‑offs in quality, power, complexity, and spectrum use, and explore the effectiveness of cross‑layer optimization. The authors formalize the cross‑layer problem, analyze its challenges, and propose several solutions, including an examination of how a station’s cross‑layer strategy affects the multimedia performance of neighboring stations. They introduce a fairness concept that leverages diverse cross‑layer strategies, demonstrating its superiority over traditional wireline resource allocation, and propose a competitive paradigm that lets stations dynamically harvest or release resources to enhance multimedia quality or reduce power consumption.
Wireless networks are poised to enable a variety of existing and emerging multimedia streaming applications. As the use of wireless local area networks spreads beyond simple data transfer to bandwidth-intense, delay-sensitive, and loss-tolerant multimedia applications, addressing quality of service issues become extremely important. Currently, a multitude of protection and adaptation strategies exists in the different layers of the open systems interconnection (OSI) stack. Hence, an in-depth understanding and comparative evaluation of these strategies are necessary to effectively assess and enable the possible trade-offs in multimedia quality, power consumption, implementation complexity, and spectrum utilization that are provided by the various OSI layers. This further opens the question of cross-layer optimization and its effectiveness in providing an improved solution with respect to the above trade-offs. In this article we formalize the cross-layer problem, discuss its challenges, and present several possible solutions. Moreover, we also discuss the impact the cross-layer optimization strategy deployed at one station has on the multimedia performance of other stations. We introduce a new fairness concept for wireless multimedia systems that employs different cross-layer strategies, and show its advantages when compared to existing resource allocation mechanisms used in wireline communications. Finally, we propose a new paradigm for wireless communications based on competition, which allows wireless stations to harvest additional resources or free up resources as well as optimally and dynamically adapt their cross-layer transmission strategies to improve multimedia quality and/or power consumption.
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