Media synchronization and QoS packet scheduling algorithms for wireless systems

• Authors: Azzedine Boukerche;Harold Owens, II
• Venue: Mobile Networks and Applications
• Year: 2005

Wireless multimedia synchronization is concerned withdistributed multimedia packets such as video, audio, text andgraphics being played-out onto the mobile clients via a basestation (BS) that services the mobile client with the multimediapackets. Our focus is on improving the Quality of Service (QoS) ofthe mobile client's on-time-arrival of distributed multimediapackets through network multimedia synchronization. We describe amedia synchronization scheme for wireless networks, and weinvestigate the multimedia packet scheduling algorithms at the basestation to accomplish our goal. In this paper, we extend the mediasynchronization algorithm by investigating four packet schedulingalgorithms: First-In-First-Out (FIFO), Highest-Priority-First (PQ),Weighted Fair-Queuing (WFQ) and Round-Robin (RR). We analyze theeffect of the four packet scheduling algorithms in terms ofmultimedia packet delivery time and the delay between concurrentmultimedia data streams. We show that the play-out of multimediaunits on the mobile clients by the base station plays an importantrole in enhancing the mobile client's quality of service in termsof intra-stream synchronization and inter-stream synchronization.Our results show that the Round-Robin (RR) packet schedulingalgorithm is, by far, the best of the four packet schedulingalgorithms in terms of mobile client buffer usage. We analyze thefour packet scheduling algorithms and make a correlation betweenplay-out of multimedia packets, by the base station, onto themobile clients and wireless network multimedia synchronization. Weclarify the meaning of buffer usage, buffer overflow, bufferunderflow, message complexity and multimedia packet delay in termsof synchronization between distributed multimedia servers, basestations and mobile clients.