Research in the Unique Environment: Mobile Multimedia Services

The future will bring many different network technologies, different operating systems, and different communication devices. Each system has its specific advantages and disadvantages. Especially in the mobile and wireless environment, a large variety of communication systems exists (GSM, WLAN, DECT, IrDA etc.). Driven by the requirements of communication infrastructures for traffic scenarios (cars, trucks, trains), we implemented several advanced systems on our flexible UNIQuE (Universal Networking Infrastructure with Quality of service Enhancement) testbed. Research topics are operating system support for mobility, proxy architectures, differentiated services, hard/soft Quality of Service (QoS), Mobile IP, and the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). This paper gives an overview of the architecture and describes one research topic, the implementation of simple user interfaces and integrated QoS mechanisms in more detail.