Design Experience with an Integrated Testbed for Wireless Multimedia Computing

Current wireless technology has enabled cellular communications, untethered information access, and local area networking. However, the wireless infrastructure today allows limited services which are predominantly voice or data. This will soon change as future evolution in wireless systems will bring together a diverse set of multimedia services to the end user. In an integrated multimedia system, Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees become a critical design issue to handle the real-time voice and video together with non-realtime data traffic. Though QoS has already been explored extensively for the broadband wireline networks, its extension into the wireless domain presents a major challenge due to the rapidly varying channel condition and the mobility of the users.