DELAY SENSITIVE DELIVERY OF RICH IMAGES OVER WLAN IN TELEMEDICINE APPLICATIONS Approved by:

My lifelong mentors iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to my thesis advisor Dr. Nikil Jayant for his constant encouragement and his faith in me. His great insights have given me enough leeway to nurture my creativity in research and yet stay focussed in my research direction. I would also like to thank my committee member Professor Raghupathy Sivakumar and Professor Yucel Altunbasak for their invaluable inputs during the course of the research. Their insights helped shape my thought process during the course of the work. I thank Professor Ian Akyildiz and Professor Doug Blough for their mentorship early in my Master program and also Ms. Barbara Satterfield, Mr. Rex Smith and Ms. Tina Clonts for their help with administrative matters. I would like to thank my parents and my sister for their unconditional love an