The ICT FP7 OPTIMIX project was a research project among nine European industrials and academic research centers in at least six countries. It began in March 2008 and went on for three years. This paper reports on the work of that project for the wireless Internet community--perhaps to help carry that work forward. The project’s aim is to increase the perceived quality of service (QoS) for the user through an efficient joint approach between the application world and the transmission world. This is achieved by two contributions: a reference functional architecture within the open systems interconnection (OSI) model, which models “a point-to-multipoint multimedia transmission from the source signal (audio or video) to the display for the end user of the received ... signal,” and a generic OMNet++ (C/C++) simulation tool that enables transmission simulation of multimedia over hybrid wired and wireless networks.

The paper is divided into six sections: “Introduction,” “Related Work,” “The OPTIMIX Architecture,” “OPTIMIX Simulator Implementation,” “Interest of the Simulation and the Results,” and “Conclusions.” Sections 3 and 4 give good, detailed explanations of the functional architecture (through discussions on application, session, transport, network, radio access, and controllers and observers) and of the simulation model (through the same method of discussion in the simulation context). Section 5 also gives a detailed discussion of the performance, binary error rates, and peak signal-to-noise-ratio improvements. The conclusion discusses what is new, as well as further research.

The report provides information for vendors, academics, and application end users who are researching strategies and platforms to improve end-to-end quality of service for multimedia applications over wireless networks. Student researchers could also study this quality paper in order to apply its information to their own areas of research.