Wireless video telephony performance: Towards applied network engineering approach

The aim of this network engineering research is to improve video transmission performance (such as end-to-end delay) in video telephony applications in cellular network scenarios. There exists a definite need for quality-of-service (QoS) and guaranteed throughput when using streaming media. However, in wireless environments where resources are precious, this is often not possible, especially with a large user base that is communicating simultaneously. Not only does traffic load pose a problem, but also the inherent instability of the radio links makes the task considerably more difficult. This presents the need for a new method for undertaking the task of wireless streaming media in resource-constrained cellular environments. Introduced and studied here is the effectiveness of a new transport-layer method based on UDP-lite, which is shown to significantly improve the performance of streaming media over noisy wireless networks in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) cellular environment.