Improve QoS of Mobile Multimedia Streaming via Cross-Layer Predictive Packet Transmission over MIPv4

As the development of broadband technologies and diversified network applications, Internet apparently becomes a part of our daily life. People can enjoy various multimedia services such as VoD, VoIP, IPTV and online gaming through prevalent Internet access. Besides, as the technology advances of mobile devices and wireless networks, nomadic users can use portable devices such as PDAs and smartphones to connect Internet via wireless links. However, wireless Internet connections have deficiencies in performance and mobility to provide seamless services for QoS-restricted multimedia communications. In this paper, we propose an effective scheme called P3T (Pre-registration & Predictive Packet Transmission) to reduce quality degradation in mobile multimedia communications while handover to new networks. P3T couples an improved pre-registration scheme with cross-layer predictive packet transmission via same network interface. Both theoretic analysis and experimental results in real-time multimedia systems of VoIP and VoD services show that our proposed scheme can significantly reduce handoff latency in layer 3 and recover lost packets from handoff.