QoS Scheduling with Opportunistic Spectrum Access for Multimedia

Thanks to the advances of multimedia application, mobile computing platform, and wireless communication technology, the research area has attracted serious attention in order to seamlessly provide interactive and ubiquitous user experience. To make it happen, the pursuit of higher system capacity in resource limited wireless networks is never-ending. Cognitive radio (CR) represents an exciting new communication paradigm with advantages on spectrum management so as to heighten channel utilization and capacity. The bandwidth demanding multimedia applications are excellent candidates to fully exploit the potential of CR. However, the research effort has been focused mainly on spectrum access while the application specific performance has been much less touched. The research considering both spectrum access and application data scheduling is emerging for maximal user experience. In this chapter, the authors first discuss advances in opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) strategies as well as multimedia QoS scheduling schemes, and then introduce the research trend on joint access and scheduling frameworks.