Adaptive Transmission of Multimedia Data over UMTS

Abstract

As communications technology is being developed, users’ demand for multimedia services raises. Meanwhile, the Internet has enjoyed tremendous growth in recent years. Consequently, there is a great interest in using the IP-based networks to provide multimedia services. One of the most important areas in which the issues are being debated is the development of standards for the universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS). UMTS constitutes the third generation of cellular wireless networks which aims to provide high-speed data access along with real-time voice calls. Wireless data is one of the major boosters of wireless communications and one of the main motivations of the next-generation standards. Bandwidth is a valuable and limited resource for UMTS and every wireless network in general. Therefore, it is of extreme importance to exploit this resource in the most efficient way. Consequently, when a user experiences a streaming video, there should be enough bandwidth available at any time for any other application that the mobile user might need. In addition, when two different applications run together, the network should guarantee that there is no possibility for any of the above-mentioned applications to prevail against the other by taking all the available channel bandwidth. Since Internet applications adopt mainly TCP as the transport protocol, while streaming applications mainly use RTP, the network should guarantee that RTP does not prevail against the TCP traffic. This means that there should be enough bandwidth available in the wireless channel for the Internet applications to run properly.