Quality of service support over multi-service wireless Internet links

Internet application performance over wireless links is disappointing, since wireless impairments adversely affect higher protocol layers. In order to address these problems without global protocol modifications, we examine link layer enhancement schemes. Simulations show that different schemes work best for different applications. We have thus developed a multi-service link layer architecture that simultaneously enhances the performance of diverse applications by supporting multiple link mechanisms concurrently. Simulations show that our approach dramatically improves performance. We present various ways of embedding this architecture into the Internet, thus allowing applications to select themselves the appropriate trade-off between throughput, loss and delay.