End-to-end QoS provision and control in wireless communication systems by means of digital watermarking signal processing

In this contribution, motivation and operating guidelines for Quality of Service (QoS) provision and control in wireless communications are discussed and investigated. In the last years, there has been an explosive growth in mobile communications providing in the next future the transmission rates required by most potential users, but the practical question arises of what type of services can be performed, as well as when and where. In response to this issue, QoS management is designed to hide low-level application variation and provide necessary service guarantees. In particular, we focus on the end-to-end service quality methodologies applying a QoS evaluation technique by means of an unconventional use of fragile watermarking. This technique was recently introduced as "tracing watermarking" for blind QoS assessment in multimedia applications. Extending those preliminary results, the QoS evaluation technique is here widely applied to typical operating scenarios of wireless/mobile communications through extensive simulation trials. The results for mobile wireless networks confirm the validity of such approach.