Forward information - a general approach for scalable audiovisual service delivery

Over wireless networks, real-time service delivery is a highly non-trivial task as the varying channel condition makes difficult to meet the strict delay constraints. To achieve high user-perceived quality adaptive applications and adaptation-supportive network entities play a key role. Recently, cross-layer adaptation is getting acceptance as a method that efficiently increases the performance of wireless communications. Unlike previous works, which mainly addressed the issue of adaptation-feedback to the application, we focus on the information that the application can provide to the network to guide local adaptation. We collect a set of relevant application layer information for rate adaptation and error protection of audiovisual services. As a key enabler of cross-layer adaptation, we present a general, codec independent, framework for the distribution of these parameters in the network.