Realizing mobile wireless Internet telephony and streaming multimedia testbed

Streaming real-time multimedia content over the Internet is gaining momentum in the communications, entertainment, music and interactive game industries as well as in the military. In general, streaming applications include IP telephony, multimedia broadcasts and various interactive applications such as multi-party conferences, collaborations and multiplayer games. Successfully realizing such applications in a highly mobile environment, however, presents many research challenges. In order to investigate such challenges and demonstrate viable solutions, we have developed an experimental indoor and outdoor testbed laboratory. By implementing standard IETF protocols into this testbed, we have demonstrated the basic functionalities required of the mobile wireless Internet to successfully support mobile multimedia access. These requirements include signaling, registration, dynamic configuration, mobility binding, location management, Authentication Authorization and Accounting (AAA), and quality of service over a variety of radio access network (RAN) technologies (e.g. 802.11b, CDMA/GPRS). In this paper, we describe this testbed and discuss important design issues and tradeoffs. We detail the incorporation and inter-relation of a wide catalog of IETF protocols-such as SIP, SAP, SDP, RTP/RTCP/RTSP, MGCP, variants of Mobile-IP, DRCP, HMMP, PANA, and DSNP-to achieve our goals. We believe that the results and experiences obtained from this experimental testbed will advance the understanding of the pertinent deployment issues for a Mobile Wireless Internet. (C) 2003 A. Dutta Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.