Rethinking Wireless Internet with Smart Media

Third-generation mobile networks (3G) will support the end-to-end delivery of IP to wireless end-devices. The cost of this infrastructure and the moderate data-rates that can be expected have lead to proposals for a mixed 3G and wireless LAN (WLAN) approach. WLAN delivers much higher data-rates, currently up to 11 Mbps (IEEE 802.11b). Field trials with public WLAN extensions to Gigabit Ethernet networks show outdoor coverage of several hundred meters. Our previous work demonstrated smart delivery of multimedia involving agents running in the mobile, the access point, and the content provider. This allowed us to dynamically adapt both the application and network behavior (to each other) in order to meet the criteria for specific applications. In this paper, we extend this approach by adding service knowledge meta-data to the multimedia content (creating so-called Smart Media) to take advantage of the fact that for non real-time media content, which needs ample bandwidth to deliver, there does not need to be a coupling between transfer rate and playout rate. This approach enables the agent to further free resources for the delivery of streaming media to mobile users. In light of this approach, we propose novel network topologies with WLAN access using Smart Media Packets, for which we examine the minimal requirements for delivering the services.