| The explosive increase in wireless multimedia services motivates the rapid development of next-generation wireless networks. However, multimedia applications impose stringent and diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements, which cannot be satisfactorily addressed through the traditional layered network-protocol architecture, For this reason, cross-layer designs offer essential approaches for research and development of future wireless networks.; This thesis offers several novel approaches on cross-layer design and modeling for wireless communication networks, including: (1) cross-layer design of adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) with the automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocol; (2) cross-layer modeling of wireless links for QoS support; and (3) cross-layer scheduler design for prescribed and quantitative QoS guarantees. These approaches illustrate the impact of cross-layer engineering on wireless multimedia networks. They aim for theoretical and practical system engineering to achieve favorable tradeoffs among QoS, resource utilization and implementation complexity.; The results of this thesis motivate future investigations of multi-mode reconfigurable/cognitive radio architectures, which will extend the existing cross-layer designs (one-dimensional protocol stack) to cross-mode/cross-layer engineering (two dimensional protocol stack). The ultimate goal is to provide wireless multimedia services with improved tradeoffs between QoS and radio resource utilization. |
