With the increase of mobile users of laptop computers and cellular phones, support of Internet services like e-mail and World Wide Web (WWW) access in a mobile environment is an indispensable requirement. The wireless networks must have the ability to provide real-time bursty traffic (such as voice or video) and data traffic in a multimedia environment with high quality of service. To satisfy the huge demand for wireless multimedia service, efficient channel access methods must be devised. For design and tuning of the channel access methods, the system performance must be mathematically analysed. To do so, very accurate models, that faithfully reproduce the stochastic behaviour of multimedia wireless communication and computer networks, must be constructed. This book attempts to present exact and approximate analytical solution methods and techniques using queueing theory in the complex multimedia traffic systems with procedures of random multiple access schemes.
In particular, it presents how to approximate the system performance of discrete-time multimedia networks, the probability distribution of the interarrival time of internetwork packets at the adjacent network and the higher moments of the transmission departure distribution and delay in wireless multimedia communication environment. In general the modelling of discrete-time multimedia communication systems are more complex than that of continuous-time systems because multiple state changes can occur from one time-unit to the next. This complicates the analysis of the model. This book also discusses numerical results that illustrate the applications of the theory and various properties.