Application-oriented multimedia scheduling over lossy wireless networks

This work seeks a better understanding of the relations between the better network service provided by QoS-oriented wireless packet scheduling and the actual benefits perceived by the multimedia applications that use them. Through extensive simulations driven by real (multimedia and wireless channel error) traces, we observe that in general, there is a performance gap between application perceived QoS and network QoS provided by the wireless fair packet scheduler. This gap tends to increase further as the channel error rate aggravates. The exact distribution of channel errors greatly affects the multimedia application performance, but its impact on network QoS is much smaller. We then present the solution, which is based on Idealized Weighted Fair Queuing (IWFQ) to further improve three popular multimedia applications' performance.