Third generation personal communication systems are likely to involve many bursty, mobile, multi-media users whose quality of service needs may vary dynamically over time. In order for a wireless system to respond adequately to these demands it will be necessary to determine fundamental mechanisms for allocating QoS needs in the radio environment. Unlike fiber optic links, radio links are likely to be expensive and of poorer quality. Thus, a large part of the quality of service arbitration will have to be supported via coding and other link enhancements techniques. In this proposal, we first present findings that reveal the importance of higher order error statistics in assessing the impact of particular forms of error control on higher layer services. Then we note that when communications are conducted over a layered stack, a particular error control module exerts influence on the overall end to end performance not only via its own error correcting capabilities but also via the type of error events that it passes up to the higher layers. Therefore, we propose to investigate error management mechanisms that not only correct errors but also shape and possibly exploit the statistics of the residual errors that escape to the higher layers. Finally, given a set of end user performance requirements, one can conceive of multiple ways of distributing the error control functions. So, we propose to investigate how to distribute the error control functions. We expect that the proposed work will help in the design of a new generation of network radios.
