Loss profiles: A quality of service measure in mobile computing

With rapid technological advances being made in the area of wireless communications it is expected that, in the near future,mobile users will be able to access a wide variety of services that will be made available over future high-speed networks. The quality of these services in the high-speed network domain can be specified in terms of several QOS parameters. In this paper we identify a new QOS parameter for the mobile environment, calledloss profiles, that ensuresgraceful degradation of service (for applications that can tolerate loss) in situations where user demands exceed the network's capacity to satisfy them. A new transport sub-layer is proposed that efficiently implements this new QOS parameter. We also show how this protocol can be easily incorporated into existing proposals for high-speed network transport layer protocols and into the MPEG-2 Transport System.This work was supported by the NSF under grant number NCR-9410357.