Joint admission and rate control for multimedia sharing in wireless home networks

With the increasing popularity of broadband digital TV and digitized residential entertainment, home networking is attracting increasing attentions in the industry, the academia and the standardization organizations. Multimedia sharing is a promising service in home networks. Effective Quality-of-Service (QoS) provision for various multimedia services is a very significant challenge in home networks due to real-time transmission demand, multimedia heterogeneous characteristics and limited resources over radio interface (e.g. power, bandwidth). In this paper, we propose a Joint Admission and Rate Control (JARC) scheme for the QoS requirements of multimedia sharing in wireless home networks. JARC is designed to support QoS at both the user level and the network level. In particular, JARC ensures QoS provision at the user level using rate control at the application layer by considering the heterogenous nature of in-home digital appliances and exploiting the flexible multimedia processing. In addition, JARC is able to provide parameterized QoS guarantee at the network level using admission control of the Medium Access Control (MAC) layer by accurately predicting the QoS parameters with respect to packet delay and the bandwidth configuration of multimedia sessions. Simulation results demonstrate that JARC is able to flexibly allocate the wireless bandwidth to various multimedia services and provide QoS guarantee for multimedia applications in home networks. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.