Impact of Mobility on Entertainment Services’ Performance in Heterogeneous Wireless Environment

Emerging multimedia services are becoming very attractive for next-generation wireless networks. However, both limited quality of service (QoS) support and lack of bandwidth at the air interface restrain their wide deployment in current evolution of third generation (3G) wireless systems. Mp3-based entertainment applications, such as file downloading and streaming which are common nowadays in the Internet, are supposed to be very challenging and demanding services for nextgeneration wireless networks. In this paper we consider mp3 traffic delivery using two wireless access technologies, which are claimed to be used in next-generation wireless networks, wireless local area network (WLAN) and general packet radio service (GPRS). We provide our experiments under different user’s mobility patterns and compare the QoS of these services provided over wireless access with local area network (LAN) access technology. Additionally, we practically investigate specific issues arising in QoS assurance for both mp3 streaming and downloading services. 4G All-IP network, WLAN, GPRS, multimedia services, testbed, mobility patterns