Wireless awareness for multimedia applications

Wireless awareness is the capability of networking applications to be aware of the existence and characteristics of wireless links in the communication path. Based on the separation principle, which states that media transfer, control and management are functionally distinct architecture activities, this paper focuses on the wireless awareness architecture and approaches other than adaptation schemes for wireless multimedia applications. The uniqueness of this research is that wireless awareness is studied in such a systematic way that the existence and characteristics of the wireless links are investigated from both the end-host's and the network's point of view. Two approaches are proposed to make multimedia applications wireless aware, i.e. the end-host approach by accessing the device driver of the network interface card and the network approach by instrumenting round-trip-time values of communication entities. Experiments show that, by deploying wireless awareness, the multimedia application can adapt to the wireless networking environment proactively and reactively.