A cross-layer framework for content based fine-grained scheduling of audiovisual streams over wireless network

Today, audiovisual communication over wireless networks is widespread deployed over the whole world. Indeed wireless voice communication were representing the emerging service over the last years. During the last decades, media transmission over wireless access networks was continuously improved, while worldwide active standardization organization, i.e. Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) or other IMT-2000 family members have actively contributed to this process. Recently new media encoding technologies based on an layered architecture offers a next generation method in audiovisual media delivery, inherently usable for optimized and efficient transmission over wireless packet switched transport and access networks. Emphasizing that a per media frame prioritization can be achieved by such layered encoding. However, the highly varying nature of wireless channels and the stringent requirement of real-time application require enhancements of service delivery. Thus, extensions on content based packet scheduling is required to achieve a high user-perceived quality for the transmission over highly error prone channels. We describe the method and design of a content based, per-packet scheduling, we either build upon the layered architecture, which provide an information about the importance for each media frame, scheduled for delivery. We investigated that cross-layer information is required to facilitate an extended packet scheduling with the aim to maintain the delivery performance of common and shared transport channels. The approach presented herein, has been developed by the Multimedia Pipe (M-PIPE) project.