Quality of service support over multi-service wireless Internet links

Internet application performance over wireless links is disappointing. sinc e wireless impairments adversely affect higher protocol layers. In order to address these problems without global protocol modifications, we examine l ink layer enhancement schemes. Simulations show that different schemes work best for different applications. We have thus developed a multi-service li nk layer architecture that simultaneously enhances the performance of diver se applications by supporting multiple link mechanisms concurrently. Simula tions show that our approach dramatically improves performance. We present various ways of embedding this architecture into the Internet, thus allowin g applications to select themselves the appropriate trade-off between throu ghput, loss and delay. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.