Wireless Multimedia Networks : 5G base connectivity

1
Mrs. Lorate Shiny, 2Bijoy Kumar Gupta, 3Ashish Kulkarni, 4 Sonal R, 5Amit kumar
1
Assistant professor 2,3,4&5 UG Students

CSE Department, Sri Sairam College of Engineering

Anekal, Bengaluru-562106

ABSTRACT existing public telecommunication networks, satellite

networks, wireless networks, the Internet, etc. We have to
study each such network not only as an independent entity,
Advances in information technologies have made it but also as a collection. The underlying protocol will most
possible to have Personal Information Service, i.e., like be Internet Protocol (IP) based.
personalized multimedia information available anywhere, In Section 2, we will describe some applications of
anytime. Such ubiquitous access requires that a portion of wireless multimedia systems. Enabling technologies of
the underlying network infrastructure be wireless. such applications, and the challenges to be overcome before
Therefore, a number of challenges associated with such systems will be widely deployed will be included in
operating a wireless multimedia network must be Section 3. We conclude in Section 4.
overcome. In this paper, we have identified these
challenges and some solutions. 2 Applications
Multimedia integration and real-time networking create
1 Introduction a wide range of opportunities for multimedia applications.
According to the different requirements imposed upon the
With the affluence that comes with economic information, communication, and computing subsystems,
developments and technological advances, citizens around distributed multimedia applications may be broadly
the world will demand personalized, on-demand, high classified into three types [10]: interactive video (ITV),
quality information services, or Personal Information tele-cooperation, and hypermedia applications. ITV
Service (PIS)[8]. Such services are characterized by being requires very high transmission rate and stringent quality of
personalized, i.e., tailored to the individual user, and service (QS) guarantees. It is therefore difficult to provide
ubiquitous, i.e., available any where, any time. For such broadband services over existing low speed wireless
example, while in the past we are satisfied with broadcast networks. ITV typically demands point-to-point, switched
TV, in which millions of people watch the same programs, connections. Bandwidth requirement is asymmetric in that
now we want video on-demand (VOD), which allows one the bandwidth of the downstream channel which carries
to choose the video at the desired time, and to interact with video programs from the server to the user is much higher
it. Another example is Personal Communication Service than that of the upstream channel from the user to the server.
(PCS)[11]. Each user is assigned a personal Tele-cooperation requires multicast, multipoint, and
telecommunication number, and may be reached any where multiservice network support for group distribution. In
in the world. In addition, each user will be able to access a contrast to the strict requirement on the video quality in ITV
variety of communication services on demand. The Internet applications, tele-cooperation applications, such as
provides yet another example of such personalized service, videophone and desktop conferencing, allow lower picture
with each user customizing his access through a series of quality, and therefore lower bandwidth requirements. It is
mouse clicks to get the information desired. Advances in possible to provide such services with the existing wireless
computer, communication, consumer electronics, and networks. Hypermedia applications, such as world wide
information technologies in recent years have actually made web browsing, are retrieval services, and require point or
such services available today to selected people. However, multipoint to point and switched services. As with tele-
to make them available to the masses we must overcome a cooperation applications, hypermedia applications require
number of challenges. In particular, we must develop the powerful multimedia database systems, with intuitive user
infrastructure and protocols to support such services. This interface such as visual query support, and content-based
infrastructure will be a network of networks, including the indexing and retrieval. Due to the huge volume of data
transmitted, the existing wireless infrastructure can only telecommunication world is towards ”personalized”
support hypermedia applications in very limited forms. For information service.
example, while it is possible to surf the web with a notebook
computer connected to a cellular system, the user will suffer
excessive waiting while files are downloaded from the
3 Enabling technologies and challenges
remote servers to the portable device through the slow
The development of computing, networking, and
wireless link.
consumer electronics technologies have made it possible to
The Wireless Multimedia Forum defined the following have wireless multimedia systems. In fact, today we can
wireless multimedia service, namely, streaming multimedia have limited forms of such service. A personal digital
(on-demand/live/scheduled), downloading multimedia, assistant (PDA) connected to a cellular phone with a
uploading multimedia, multimedia messaging (e.g. video modem will allow us to send and receive email. There are
email), wireless video surveillance (e.g. wireless video also various forms of wireless data services available. Such
camera), real-time multimedia communication (e.g. services, however, are very limited in terms of data rates,
videophone, videoconferencing), and interactive and hence the form and variety of services available. A
multimedia games. Again, each service will impose very number of problems must be overcome before the large
different requirements on the underlying system scale deployment of wireless multimedia systems.
infrastructure.
Perhaps the key application of wireless multimedia 1. Limited bandwidth
service will be M-commerce, which may be defined as the
transacting of business on a non-proprietary wireless Perhaps the most difficult problem is due to the
network, such as the existing cellular radio networks and wireless medium itself, which is limited in bandwidth,
3G networks. We have chosen to exclude wireless systems and suffers from such transmission problems as
that utilize a dedicated wireless network running fading, multipath, etc. Error correction or error
proprietary protocols, because we believe that for m- detection with retransmission may be used to
commerce to flourish, the users must have ubiquitous overcome the transmission errors, but this is at the
access to this network infrastructure, and it will be difficult expense of lower bandwidth utilization. Since the
for a proprietary system to claim ubiquity. At the same time, bandwidth is very limited to begin with, the hostile
our definition will include non-cellular wireless systems wireless medium does pose a very serious problem. To
such as Wireless Local Area Networks, Bluetooth-based, overcome this difficulty, there are three major
and even satellite-based networks using non-proprietary approaches: (1) increase the amount of data
protocols. M-commerce may also be more generally transmitted in a given bandwidth, (2) minimize the
defined as applications and services built on non- amount of data transmitted, and (3) make more
proprietary wireless network platforms. In this sense, the bandwidth available. Using a more efficient
more narrowly defined m-commerce may be included as modulation scheme to fit more data within a given
one of the applications, and other applications, such as bandwidth is an example of the first approach.
remote monitoring and telemetry, information Developing more efficient multiple access schemes so
dissemination, etc., will also be included. In this paper, we that more users can share the same bandwidth is
will use the more general definition. No matter which another. The deployment of smart antennas to provide
definition you fancy, m-commerce is going to be huge. space diversity and hence increase the capacity is also
According to the Gartner Group, the global market for proposed. The second approach relies on various data
wireless data services will be over USD 50 billion by the compression techniques. For example, the JPEG (Joint
year 2004, with 40% of the business-to consumer e- Photographic Experts Group) standard uses the
commerce transactions outside North America conducted Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) to compress an
over a mobile phone. It is also estimated that there will be image, squeezing out the spatial redundancy within
over one billion wireless subscribers worldwide by 2003 the image, while the MPEG (Motion Picture Experts
(source: Dataquest). One of the strongest growth regions is Group) standard adds the motion compensation
China, which has recently surpassed the US as the country technique to further reduce the amount of data
with the largest number of mobile subscribers. The Asia required by squeezing out the temporal redundancies
Pacific region is expected to become the leading region for from image to image in a video. The reader is referred
wireless data services by 2004. to Li and Liao[10] for an introduction to the JPEG,
Of course, an explosive growth in cellular telephony MPEG, and other data compression standards. To
may not necessarily translate to successful m-commerce. further reduce the amount of data transmitted, MPEG-
We believe m-commerce will be successful because[9]: (1) 4[6] uses an object-oriented approach. Different parts
It is a more cost-effective way to conduct business. It saves of a moving image will be encoded separately, so that
money by providing ”just-in-time information delivery.” parts with less activities can be encoded using even
(2) The ”just-in-time” feature of mobile communications less data. Finally, multi-resolution techniques may be
will introduce a variety of new services. (3) The trend in the used to tailor the amount of data transmitted with the
 amount of details required. The third approach makes the foreign agent to the sender of the packet, and all
more bandwidth available for wireless future packets will be sent directly to the foreign
communications. For example, the United States agent.
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has
released 300 MHz of unlicensed, ettiquette less, radio 3. Heterogeneous infrastructure
spectrum for wireless data networks. This Unlicensed
National Information Infrastructure (U-NII) will allow
The key to successful wireless multimedia service
the development of broadband, wireless multimedia
development is the availability of a ubiquitous network
access. The International Telecommunications
infrastructure. Some believe this infrastructure is 3G.
Union’s International Mobile Telecommunications-
Others, pointing to proposals to connect whole cities
2000project has developed 3G standards which allow
with Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), and the
multimedia communications with bandwidth on
fact that WLANs represent more mature technology and
demand and data rates of up to 2 Mbps.
are implemented in the license-free band, believe
WLANs will prove to be formidable competition for 3G.
2. Mobility Management
There are yet others who believe that Bluetooth based
networks will be the network infrastructure of the future.
This deals with the difficulty due to the movement of We believe the wireless network infrastructure will
the users. Hence we need to solve the problem of how include each of these three components. We expect this
to keep track of the movements of the user, and how infrastructure to be a network of networks, with a
to send data to a user who is moving around. To collection of wired networks at the core, and a number
provide ubiquitous communications, the system has to of access networks connecting individual users to the
track the movement of the user. One solution is to core. An access network may be a 2G or 3G network, a
divide the whole system into location areas[11]. When WLAN, a Bluetooth-based network, or even a satellite-
the user enters a new location area, a location update based network. We have to study this infrastructure not
transaction will be performed to inform the system of only as an independent entity, but also as a collection. In
the new location. When a message is destined to this addition, we have to tackle the problems which arise at
user, a database query is performed to find the actual the interconnections of such components, since each of
location and the paging function is executed to alert them has very different characteristics. This calls for the
the user. With this location information, a specified development of adaptive protocols which adapts
area is paged instead of the whole system. This is the automatically to different applications and to the
solution used in cellular telephone systems. There are different underlying infrastructure. Thus, a movie-on-
various ways in which these location update and demand application will require much better video
paging functions may be performed, including manual quality, and hence higher transmission bandwidth, than
and automatic location updates, static and dynamic a video conferencing application. A communication
paging areas, etc. to minimize the location update and session running on a path consisting of both wired and
paging traffic. To support roaming, i.e., allowing a wireless components will need to determine
user to continue to communicate outside of the user’s automatically the medium it is running on, and adjusts
primary subscription area, when a user visits a foreign the protocol parameters such as acknowledgment
area, the foreign system will send a location update timeout, data rates, etc. In addition, such adaptation
message to the user’s home subscription area. Any should be transparent to the users, so they can focus on
future calls to this roaming user will first be directed the applications at hand, rather than worry about the
to the user’s home location database, and then characteristics of the particular components they are
forwarded to the foreign system where the user is now connected with.
located. A similar solution is used by the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF) Mobile IP Working Of course, the corresponding wireless access devices
Group[7] to allow portable computers to stay must be readily available. In fact, one of the reasons
connected to the Internet, and to use the same IP many believe m-commerce will be huge is the fact that
address when it roams to a distant Internet site. Each in many parts of the world, more people own cellular
site which allows its users to roam has a home agent, phones than personal computers. If services and
and each site which allows visitors has a foreign agent. applications are available and affordable, it is
When a mobile user visits a foreign site, it contacts the expected that these users will use the mobile device as
foreign agent and registers. The foreign agent contacts the preferred medium to conduct e-commerce.
the home agent of the mobile and gives it the foreign
4. Quality of Service Guarantees
agent’s IP address. When a packet arrives at the home
site addressed to this mobile, it will be forwarded to
the foreign agent who will in turn pass it to the mobile. Due to the problems inherent in wireless networks,
In addition, the home agent will pass the IP address of deterministic service guarantees and bandwidth
 allocation, commonly used in wired networks, become network feedback. In particular, if no acknowledgment
inadequate in wireless networks. We believe that a is received for a transmission after a certain timeout,
more flexible service model which allows variable QS TCP assumes the network is congested, and reduces the
is needed. In [2], we propose a utility-oriented amount of transmitted data. However, in a wireless
wireless adaptive QS model and a bandwidth network, lack of an acknowledgment within the timeout
allocation scheme which accounts for the users’ QS may be due to a variety of reasons, such as the long
requirements and actively adapts to the dynamics of round-trip propagation delay to the satellite in a satellite-
the physical channel. There has been much work on based system, or the retransmission delays of erroneous
wireless resource (bandwidth) management, focusing packets. There is much active research on how to adapt
on multiple access and channel allocation[1]. Most of such protocols to the wireless environment. Another
the previous work tackled one aspect of the bandwidth important technology is how to transmit multimedia
allocation problem,i.e. the dynamics of user requests. data, especially video data, in a wireless network. One
That is, resolving conflicts due to users’ of the key attractions of future wireless systems such as
uncoordinated requests and allocating transmission 3G is the ability to transmit at relatively high speed
slots or call channels appropriately to satisfy those compared to 2G systems, and to accommodate video
requests. However, there is less research on adding transmissions. Despite the higher transmission speed of
explicit adaptive mechanisms to bandwidth allocation 3G systems, it is still inadequate for high quality video
schemes to deal with the variations of wireless transmissions. Moreover, since future high speed
channels. networks will co-exist with existing lower speed
networks, it is important to develop adaptive video
5. Wireless Security transmission and compression schemes such that
depending on the quality of the wireless channel, the
To successfully deploy wireless multimedia service, a right amount of video data will be transmitted to
number of complementary technologies are required. optimize the utility to the user. Again, this is an area of
One such technology is security. Wireless active research, and we believe solutions will be
transmission is inherently insecure compared with forthcoming.
wired transmission due to its susceptibility to 7. Power Supply
eavesdropping. The users have to be assured that the
information transmitted will be free from being
The development of the battery has lagged far behind the
intercepted, and modified by hostile parties. It is
improvements achieved in computational power and
therefore important to have secure transmission
memory. There is an urgent need to develop low cost,
technologies, such as those based on the Public Key
high-density, light-weight battery systems. In the
Infrastructure (PKI). PKI not only encrypts the data so
meantime, a number of ways have been proposed to
only the intended receiver can read it, but also allows
conserve the battery, such as using less power hungry
authentication of the sender, and prevents
components in the portable unit, moving the intensive
unauthorized modifications to the transmitted data.
computations to the backbone network from the portable
The digital signature component of PKI also provides
unit[3], and such power-saving features as automatic
non-repudiation, i.e., once you have signed a
blanking of the display after a timeout, activating
document digitally, you cannot deny it. In fact, many
different communication ports only when they are
governments have already passed electronic
required, etc. I personally do not believe moving the
transaction laws giving digital signatures under PKI
computations to the backbone system is a good solution.
the same legal status as the traditional hand-written
Due to the frequent disconnections inherent in a wireless
signatures.
transmission medium, we should try to have most of the
The prevalent wireless LAN standard is IEEE 802.11, computations performed on-board, to minimize the
and the 802.1X draft standard[4] has been proposed to number of data exchanges between the portable units
implement security in such systems. and the system. Every data exchange increases the
loading on the communication link, and more
6. Wireless Internet technologies importantly, increases the possibility we may have
inconsistent data due to transmission errors.
The prevalent network protocol on the network
infrastructure is most likely going to be the Internet
Protocol (IP). However, IP has been designed for wired 4. Conclusion
networks, which are less error-prone, and enjoy more
bandwidth compared with wireless channels. For Advances in computing, communications, and consumer
example, one major IP protocol is the Transmission electronics have made it possible to have ubiquitous
Control Protocol (TCP), which throttles the amount of wireless multimedia service. To make such services widely
data permitted to be sent by a particular user based on available, a number of challenges associated with operating
a wireless multimedia system must be overcome. In this
paper, we have identified these challenges and some
solutions. We hope that we have succeeded in stimulating
other researchers to work on these challenges, and in time,
we will have wireless multimedia services widely available.

Acknowledgment

This research is supported in part by the Research Grants

Council, Hong Kong, under Grant No. HKU 7225/99E, and
in part by the National Science Council of Taiwan under
Grant No. NSC 90-2213-E-002-119. It is an updated and
expanded version of a Keynote Address given at the
IEE/CIC/IEEE International Conference on Personal,
Mobile and Spread Spectrum Communications, Shanghai,
China, June 1998.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_network