Media Synchronization and QoS Packet Scheduling Algorithms for Wireless Systems

Wireless multimedia synchronization is concerned with distributed multimedia packets such as video, audio, text and graphics being played-out onto the mobile clients via a base station (BS) that services the mobile client with the multimedia packets. Our focus is on improving the Quality of Service (QoS) of the mobile client's on-time-arrival of distributed multimedia packets through network multimedia synchronization. We describe a media synchronization scheme for wireless networks, and we investigate the multimedia packet scheduling algorithms at the base station to accomplish our goal. In this paper, we extend the media synchronization algorithm by investigating four packet scheduling algorithms: First-In-First-Out (FIFO), Highest-Priority-First (PQ), Weighted Fair-Queuing (WFQ) and Round-Robin (RR). We analyze the effect of the four packet scheduling algorithms in terms of multimedia packet delivery time and the delay between concurrent multimedia data streams. We show that the play-out of multimedia units on the mobile clients by the base station plays an important role in enhancing the mobile client's quality of service in terms of intra-stream synchronization and inter-stream synchronization. Our results show that the Round-Robin (RR) packet scheduling algorithm is, by far, the best of the four packet scheduling algorithms in terms of mobile client buffer usage. We analyze the four packet scheduling algorithms and make a correlation between play-out of multimedia packets, by the base station, onto the mobile clients and wireless network multimedia synchronization. We clarify the meaning of buffer usage, buffer overflow, buffer underflow, message complexity and multimedia packet delay in terms of synchronization between distributed multimedia servers, base stations and mobile clients.