A differentiated Services Architecture for Quality of Service Provisioning in Wireless Local Area Networks

Currently the issue of Quality of Service (QoS) is a major problem in IP networks due to the growth in multimedia traffic (e.g. voice and video applications) and therefore many mechanisms like IntServ, DiffServ, etc. have been proposed. Since the IEEE 802.11b (or Wi-Fi) standard was approved in 1999, it has gained in popularity to become the leading Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology with millions of such networks deployed worldwide. Wireless networks have a limited capacity (11 Mbits/s in the case of Wi-Fi networks) owing to the limited amount of frequency spectrum available. At any given time there may be a large number of users contending for access which results in the bandwidth available to each user being severely limited. Moreover, the system does not differentiate between traffic types which means that all traffic, regardless of its importance or priority, experiences the same QoS. An important network application requiring QoS guarantees is the provision of time-bounded services, such as voice over IP and video streaming, where the combination of packet delay, jitter and packet loss will impact on the perceived QoS. Consequently this has led to a large amount of research work focussing mainly on QoS enhancement schemes for the 802.11 MAC mechanism. The Task Group E of the IEEE 802.11 working group has been developing an extension to the Wi-Fi standard that proposes to make changes to the MAC mechanism to support applications with QoS requirements. The 802.11e QoS standard is currently undergoing final revisions before approval expected sometime in 2004. As 802.11e WLAN equipment is not yet available, performance reports can only be based on simulation. The objective of this thesis was to develop a computer simulator that implements the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard and to use this simulator to evaluate the QoS performance enhancement potential of 802.11e. This thesis discusses the QoS facilities, analyses the MAC protocol enhancements and compares them with the original 802.11 standard. The issue of QoS provisioning is primarily concerned with providing predictable performance guarantees with regard to throughput, packet delay, jitter and packet loss. The simulated results indicate that the proposed QoS enhancements to the MAC will considerably improve QoS performance in 802.11b WLANs. However, in order for the proposed 802.11e QoS mechanism to be effective the 802.11e parameters will need to be continually adjusted in order to ensure QoS guarantees are fulfilled for all traffic loads

Wireless broadband access: WiMAX and beyond - Investigation of bandwidth request mechanisms under point-to-multipoint mode of WiMAX networks

The WiMAX standard specifies a metropolitan area broadband wireless access air interface. In order to support QoS for multimedia applications, various bandwidth request and scheduling mechanisms are suggested in WiMAX, in which a subscriber station can send request messages to a base station, and the base station can grant or reject the request according to the available radio resources. This article first compares two fundamental bandwidth request mechanisms specified in the standard, random access vs. polling under the point-to-multipoint mode, a mandatory transmission mode. Our results demonstrate that random access outperforms polling when the request rate is low. However, its performance degrades significantly when the channel is congested. Adaptive switching between random access and polling according to load can improve system performance. We also investigate the impact of channel noise on the random access request mechanism

Connection admission control and packet scheduling for IEEE 802.16 networks

Includes bibliographical references.The IEEE 802.16 standard introduced as one of the Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMAN) for Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) which is known as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), provides a solution of broadband connectivity to areas where wired infrastructure is economically and technically infeasible. Apart from the advantage of having high speeds and low costs, IEEE 802.16 has the capability to simultaneously support various service types with required QoS characteristics. ... While IEEE 802.16 standard defines medium access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) layers specification, admission control and packet scheduling mechanisms which are important elements of QoS provisioning are left to vendors to design and implement for service differentiation and QoS support

Enhancement of QoS support of HCCA schedulers using EDCA function in IEEE 802.11e networks

The IEEE 802.11e standard introduces Quality of Service support for wireless local area networks through two MAC functions: Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and HCF Controlled Channel Access (HCCA). While the former provides prioritized contention-based access to the medium, the latter uses a parameterized contention-free polling scheme. Several studies have proposed enhancements to EDCA or improved scheduling algorithms for HCCA to properly support VBR traffic. However, the cooperation between these functions has only marginally been considered and the solutions vary depending on specific traffic requirements. In this paper we propose a novel approach to address the problem of scheduling VBR traffic streams. Our scheduler, named Overboost, uses HCCA to negotiate a minimum bandwidth and deals with traffic streams that require more bandwidth than the negotiated one by redirecting the excess bandwidth to the EDCA function. An analytical evaluation has been conducted and the results has been corroborated by an extensive set of simulations. They show that the overall scheduler improves the performance with respect to other HCCA schedulers in terms of null rate, throughput, access delay, and queue length

Implementation and Performance Evaluation of an NGN prototype using WiMax as an Access Technology

Telecommunications networks have evolved to IP-based networks, commonly known as Next Generation Networks (NGN). The biggest challenge in providing high quality realtime multimedia applications is achieving a Quality of Service (QoS) consistent with user expectations. One of the key additional factors affecting QoS is the existence of different QoS mechanisms on the heterogeneous technologies used on NGN platforms. This research investigates the techniques used to achieve consistent QoS on network technologies that use different QoS techniques. Numerous proposals for solving the end-to-end QoS problem in IP networks have adopted policy-based management, use of signalling protocols for communicating applications QoS requirements across different Network Elements and QoS provisioning in Network Elements. Such solutions are dependent on the use of traffic classification and knowledge of the QoS requirements of applications and services on the networks. This research identifies the practical difficulties involved in meeting the QoS requirements of network traffic between WiMax and an IP core network. In the work, a solution based on the concept of class-of-service mapping is proposed. In the proposed solution, QoS is implemented on the two networks and the concept of class-of-service mapping is used to integrate the two QoS systems. This essentially provides consistent QoS to applications as they traverse the two network domains and hence meet end-user QoS expectations. The work is evaluated through a NGN prototype to determine the capabilities of the networks to deliver real-time media that meets user expectations