This book shows how networking research and quality engineering can be combined to successfully manage the transmission quality when speech and video telephony is delivered in heterogeneous wireless networks. Nomadic use of services requires intelligent management of ongoing transmission, and to make the best of available resources many fundamental trade-offs must be considered. Network coverage versus throughput and reliability of a connection is one key aspect, efficiency versus robustness of signal compression is another. However, to successfully manage services, user-perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) in heterogeneous networks must be known, and the perception of quality changes must be understood. These issues are addressed in this book, in particular focusing on the perception of quality changes due to switching between diverse networks, speech and video codecs, and encoding bit rates during active calls.

The work presented in this book focuses on modeling audiovisual quality as perceived by the users of IP-based solutions for video communication like videotelephony. It also extends the current framework for the parametric prediction of audiovisual call quality. The book addresses several aspects related to the quality perception of entire video calls, namely, the quality estimation of the single audio and video modalities in an interactive context, the audiovisual quality integration of these modalities and the temporal pooling of short sample-based quality scores to account for the perceptual quality impact of time-varying degradations.

This pioneering book develops definitions and concepts related to Quality of Experience in the context of multimedia- and telecommunications-related applications, systems and services and applies these to various fields of communication and media technologies. The editors bring together numerous key-protagonists of the new discipline “Quality of Experience” and combine the state-of-the-art knowledge in one single volume.

This book interconnects two essential disciplines to study the perception of speech: Neuroscience and Quality of Experience, which to date have rarely been used together for the purposes of research on speech quality perception. In five key experiments, the book demonstrates the application of standard clinical methods in neurophysiology on the one hand and of methods used in fields of research concerned with speech quality perception on the other. Using this combination, the book shows that speech stimuli with different lengths and different quality impairments are accompanied by physiological reactions related to quality variations, e.g., a positive peak in an event-related potential. Furthermore, it demonstrates that – in most cases – quality impairment intensity has an impact on the intensity of physiological reactions.

"This book highlights and discusses the underlying QoS issues that arise in the delivery of real-time multimedia services over wireless networks"--Provided by publisher.

Although multihomed communication is a rapidly emerging trend for next generation networks, no known book explores multihomed communication with the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). Filling this void, Multihomed Communication with SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) explains this innovative feature that allows an endpoint to sim

This brief investigates distributed medium access control (MAC) with QoS provisioning for both single- and multi-hop wireless networks including wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless ad hoc networks, and wireless mesh networks. For WLANs, an efficient MAC scheme and a call admission control algorithm are presented to provide guaranteed QoS for voice traffic and, at the same time, increase the voice capacity significantly compared with the current WLAN standard. In addition, a novel token-based scheduling scheme is proposed to provide great flexibility and facility to the network service provider for service class management. Also proposed is a novel busy-tone based distributed MAC scheme for wireless ad hoc networks and a collision-free MAC scheme for wireless mesh networks, respectively, taking the different network characteristics into consideration. The proposed schemes enhance the QoS provisioning capability to real-time traffic and, at the same time, significantly improve the system throughput and fairness performance for data traffic, as compared with the most popular IEEE 802.11 MAC scheme.

A comprehensive introduction to the basic principles, design techniques and analytical tools of wireless communications.

Accompanying DVD-ROM contains further details on critical topics related to the research discussed in the book.

The current book provides a final report of activity performed by the COST 290 Action, ‘‘Traffic and QoS Management in Wireless Multimedia Networks,’’ which ran from March 10, 2004, until June 3, 2008. After an introduction to the COST framework and the Action’s survey time-frame and activities, the main part of the book addresses a number of technical issues, which are structured into several chapters. All those issues have been carefully investigated by the COST 290 community during the course of the project – the information presented in this book can be regarded as ultimate for each particular topic; every open research issue addressed in the book is described carefully, corresponding existing studies are analyzed and results achieved by the COST 290 community are presented and compared, and further research directions are defined and analyzed. Because the book covers a wide area of research addressing issues of modern wired and wireless networking at different layers, starting from the physical layer up to the application layer, it can be recommended to be used by researchers and students to obtain a comprehensive analysis on particular research topics including related areas, to obtain broad and ultimate referencing, and to be advised on current open issues. COST 290 is one of the Actions of the European COST Program. Founded in 1971, COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research, allowing the coordination of nationally funded research on a European level.