A fair resource allocation protocol for multimedia wireless networks

Wireless networks are expected to support real-time interactive multimedia traffic and must be able, therefore, to provide their users with quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. Although the QoS provisioning problem arises in wireline networks as well, mobility of hosts and scarcity of bandwidth makes QoS provisioning a challenging task in wireless networks. It has been noticed that multimedia applications can tolerate and gracefully adapt to transient fluctuations in the QoS that they receive from the network. The additional flexibility afforded by the ability of multimedia applications to tolerate and adapt to transient changes in QoS can be exploited by protocol designers to significantly improve the overall performance of wireless systems. This paper presents a fair resource allocation protocol for multimedia wireless networks that uses a combination of bandwidth reservation and bandwidth borrowing to provide network users with QoS in terms of guaranteed bandwidth, call blocking, and call dropping probabilities. Our view of fairness was inspired by the well-known max-min fairness allocation protocol for wireline networks. Simulation results are presented that compare our protocol to similar schemes.     

Dynamic duty cycle and adaptive contention window based QoS-MAC protocol for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Rapid penetration of small, customized wireless devices and enormous growth of wireless communication technologies has already set the stage for large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks. While the need to minimize the energy consumption has driven significant researches in wireless sensor networks, offering some precise quality of service (QoS) for multimedia transmission over sensor networks has not received significant attention. However, the emerging new applications like video surveillance, telemedicine and traffic monitoring needs transmission of wireless multimedia over sensor networks. Naturally, offering some better QoS for wireless multimedia over sensor networks raises significant challenges. The network needs to cope up with battery-constraints, while providing improved QoS (end-to-end delay and bandwidth requirement). This calls for a suitable sensory MAC protocol capable of achieving application-specific QoS. In this paper, we have proposed a new QoS-based sensory MAC protocol, which not only adapts to application-oriented QoS, but also attempts to conserve energy without violating QoS-constraints. Performance modeling, analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of providing lower delay and better throughput, at the cost of reasonable energy consumption, in comparison to other existing sensory MAC protocols.     

Optimization for adaptive bandwidth reservation in wireless multimedia networks

In future wireless multimedia networks, user mobility management for seamless connection regarding realtime multimedia applications is one of the most important problems. In this paper we propose an opportunity-cost concept-based approach for adaptive bandwidth reservation with admission control for handover calls utilizing network traffic information. Excessive reservation guarantees low blocking probability of handover calls at the cost of high blocking probability of new calls. According to our survey, however, it may degrade bandwidth utilization while no prioritization for handover admissions degrades quality of service (QoS) for ongoing calls. We consider both QoS assurance and bandwidth utilization in order to optimize the amount of bandwidth to reserve for handover admissions. We believe that our scheme could be utilized as a guideline for cost-effective radio resource allocation in mobile multimedia networks.     

Enhanced MAC protocol to support multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks

With the advanced physical layer techniques such as multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), transmission real-time 2D/3D contents and applications becomes more and more necessary in wireless networks for the amazing growing in demand of customers. However, the low efficiency of medium access control (MAC) protocol degrades the performance of real-time traffic greatly in multihop, wireless and mobile environment. Focusing on supporting real-time multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks (WMNs), an enhanced MAC protocol is proposed. And the contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) An efficient carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) compatible time division multiple access (TDMA)-like MAC protocol called T-MAC is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by allocating more channel access time in centralized manner and decreasing overhead. (2) An optimal adaptive scheduling scheme is proposed to support real-time multimedia applications and guarantee QoS for different priority traffic, which aims to find the optimized schedule among all possible sequences of concurrent transmissions by minimizing the occupied resources. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e MAC scheme show that the proposed T-MAC can effectively improve quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss rate, which also manifests that T-MAC is an efficient multimedia applications transmission scheme for mobile terminals and MAPs in cognitive WMNs.     

Network-adaptive autonomic transcoding algorithm for seamless streaming media service of mobile clients

As a result of improvements in wireless communication technologies, a multimedia data streaming service can now be provided for mobile clients. Since mobile devices have low computing power and work on a low network bandwidth, a transcoding technology is needed to adapt the original streaming media for mobile environments. However, wireless networks have variable bandwidths depending on the movement of clients and the communication distance from Access Point (AP). These characteristics make it hard to support stable Quality of Service (QoS) streams for mobile clients. In this paper, a target transcoding bit-rate decision algorithm is proposed to provide stable QoS streams for mobile clients. In our experiments, the proposed algorithm provides seamless streaming media services based on the network adaptive bit rate control and reduces transmission failure.     

适合于移动多媒体网络的呼叫接纳控制算法

移动多媒体网络应该能够同时支持传统的数据业务和实时交互式多媒体业务,并能够为用户提供QoS保证.在无线移动网中提供QoS保证,呼叫接纳控制扮演着重要的角色.通过对呼叫接纳算法中资源预留方案进行了分析总结,提出了一种适合于移动多媒体网络的自适应呼叫接纳控制算法.     

A new MAC protocol design based on TDMA/FDD for QoS support in WATM networks

Several wireless networking solutions have been developed to provide different types of services for various end user applications. Currently, wireless networking infrastructures are not suitable for multimedia applications each requiring a different QoS support with various traffic parameters. Due to the success of ATM technology in the wired network, WATM concept and related researches are of importance in the information technology area. Main objective of WATM, which promises seamless transmission of different traffics such as voice, data and video over wireless medium, is to implement high bit rate and QoS guaranteed data transfer, already well achieved by ATM technology over wired medium. To support QoS guaranteed data transfer over error-prone and low bandwidth wireless medium, an effective MAC protocol must be designed and utilized. In this paper, a new TDMA/FDD based MAC protocol, maintaining QoS requirements of real-time wireless multimedia applications, is proposed. The main contribution of this study is the new guarantee-based scheduling algorithm used in the proposed MAC to support required level of QoS guarantee for all multimedia traffic types in wireless medium. Computer modeling and simulation of the new approach providing CBR, VBR, ABR and UBR ATM services are realized using OPNET Modeler. Simulation results are also presented together with comparisons those of a WATM counterpart which uses PRMA/DA MAC protocol.     

An efficient joint channel assignment and QoS routing protocol for IEEE 802.11 multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

With the emerging of video, voice over IP (VoIP) and other real-time multimedia services, more and more people pay attention to quality of service (QoS) issues in terms of the bandwidth, delay and jitter, etc. As one effective way of broadband wireless access, it has become imperative for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to provide QoS guarantee. Existing works mostly modify QoS architecture dedicated for ad hoc or sensor networks, and focus on single radio and single channel case. Meanwhile, they study the QoS routing or MAC protocol from view of isolated layer. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer QoS-aware routing protocol on OLSR (CLQ-OLSR) to support real-time multimedia communication by efficiently exploiting multi-radio and multi-channel method. By constructing multi-layer virtual logical mapping over physical topology, we implement two sets of routing mechanisms, physical modified OLSR protocol (M-OLSR) and logical routing, to accommodate network traffic. The proposed CLQ-OLSR is based on a distributed bandwidth estimation scheme, implemented at each node for estimating the available bandwidth on each associated channel. By piggybacking the bandwidth information in HELLO and topology control (TC) messages, each node disseminates information of topology and available bandwidth to other nodes in the whole network in an efficient way. From topology and bandwidth information, the optimized path can be identified. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation to verify the performance of CLQ-OLSR in different scenarios on QualNet platform. The results demonstrate that our proposed CLQ-OLSR outperforms single radio OLSR, multi-radio OLSR and OLSR with differentiated services (DiffServ) in terms of network aggregate throughput, end-to-end packet delivery ratio, delay and delay jitter with reasonable message overheads and hardware costs. In particular, the network aggregate throughput for CLQ-OLSR can almost be improved by 300% compared with the single radio case.     

Providing MAC QoS for multimedia traffic in 802.11e based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks

Ad hoc wireless networks with their widespread deployment, now need to support applications that generate multimedia and real-time traffic. Video, audio, real-time voice over IP, and other multimedia applications require the network to provide guarantees on the Quality of Service (QoS) of the connection. The 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol was proposed with the aim of providing QoS support at the MAC layer. The 802.11e performs well in wireless LANs due to the presence of Access Points (APs), but in ad hoc networks, especially multi-hop ones, it is still incapable of supporting multimedia traffic.One of the most important QoS parameters for multimedia and real-time traffic is delay. Our primary goal is to reduce the end-to-end delay, thereby improving the Packet Delivery Ratio of multimedia traffic, that is, the proportion of packets that reach the destination within the deadline, in 802.11e based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks.Our contribution is threefold: first we propose dynamic ReAllocative Priority (ReAP) scheme, wherein the priorities of packets in the MAC queues are not fixed, but keep changing dynamically. We use the laxity and the hop length information to decide the priority of the packet. ReAP improves the PDR by over 28% in comparison with 802.11e, especially under heavy loads. Second, we introduce Adaptive-TXOP (A-TXOP), where transmission opportunity (TXOP) is the time interval during which a node has the right to initiate transmissions. This scheme reduces the delay of video traffic by reducing the number of channel accesses required to transmit large video frames. It involves modifying the TXOP interval dynamically based on the packets in the queue, so that fragments of the same packet are sent in the same TXOP interval. A-TXOP is implemented over ReAP to further improve the performance of video traffic. ReAP with A-TXOP helps in reducing the delay of video traffic by over 27% and further improves the quality of video in comparison with ReAP without A-TXOP. Finally, we have TXOP-sharing, which is aimed at reducing the delay of voice traffic. It involves using the TXOP to transmit to multiple receivers, in order to utilize the TXOP interval fully. It reduces the number of contentions to the channel and thereby reduces the delay of voice traffic by over 14%. A-TXOP is implemented over ReAP to further improve the performance of voice traffic. The three schemes (ReAP, A-TXOP, and TXOP-sharing) work together to improve the performance of multimedia traffic in 802.11e based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks.     

A resource management strategy in wireless multimedia communications-total power saving in mobile terminals with a guaranteed QoS

The integration of multimedia services into wireless communication networks is a major source of future technological advances. One of the main challenging issues in this endeavor is the resource optimization strategy. This paper addresses this issue from the perspective of minimizing the total power consumption of a mobile terminal while maintaining a guaranteed quality-of-service (QoS). For many years, the management strategy has dealt primarily with bandwidth allocation, network capacity, and QoS. However, due to the integration of multimedia services, the increasing energy consumption of a mobile unit is also becoming a dominant factor in the design of communication systems. In this paper, we describe two technologies that can make a wireless multimedia communication system more energy-efficient while ensuring QoS. These technologies consist of an energy-efficient communication protocol for the uplink channel and a low-complexity multirate transmission scheme. We also provide a video transmission example using the H.263 standard in the proposed system to demonstrate the importance of our total power optimization strategy. The simulation results show that a savings of 10-32% is achieved in the total energy consumption of the mobile unit.     

End-to-end support for statistical quality of service in heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks

In heterogeneous mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), different types of mobile devices with diverse capabilities may coexist in the same network. The heterogeneity of MANETs makes end-to-end support for quality of service (QoS) guarantees more difficult than in other types of networks, not to mention the limited bandwidth and frequent topology changes of these networks. Since QoS routing is the first step toward achieving end-to-end QoS guarantees in heterogeneous MANETs, we propose a QoS routing protocol for heterogeneous MANETs. The proposed protocol, called virtual grid architecture protocol (VGAP), uses a cross-layer approach in order to provide end-to-end statistical QoS guarantees. VGAP operates on a fixed virtual rectilinear architecture (virtual grid), which is obtained using location information obtained from global positioning system (GPS). The virtual grid consists of a few, but possibly more powerful, mobile nodes known as ClusterHeads (CHs) that are elected periodically. CHs discover multiple QoS routes on the virtual grid using an extended version of the open shortest path first (OSPF) routing protocol and an extended version of WFQ scheduling policy that takes into account the wireless channel state. Moreover, VGAP utilizes a simple power control algorithm at the physical layer that provides efficient energy savings in this heterogeneous setting. Simulation experiments show that VGAP has a good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end packet delay, call blocking probability, and network scalability.     

Wireless MediaNets: application-driven next-generation wireless IP networks

Thanks to the explosive creation of multimedia contents, the pervasive adoption of multimedia coding standards and the ubiquitous access of multimedia services, multimedia networking is everywhere in our daily lives. Unfortunately, the existing best effort IP network infrastructure, originally designed with little real-time QoS requirement, has started to suffer from performance degradation on emerging multimedia networking applications. This inadequacy problem is further deepened by the prevalence of last/first-mile wireless networking, such as Wi-Fi, mobile WiMAX, and many wireless sensors and ad-hoc networks. This can be evidenced by more and more fragmentation of application-driven IP-based networks, such as for power grid distribution, networked security surveillance, intelligent transportation communication, and many other sensor networks. To overcome the QoS challenges, the next generation wireless IP networks have to be architected in a top-down manner, i.e., application-driven layered protocol design. More specifically, based on the application media data, compression schemes are applied, the subsequent Network, MAC- and PHY-layered protocols need to be accordingly or jointly enhanced to reach the optimal performance. This is the fundamental concept behind the design of Wireless MediaNets. In this survey paper, I will address the QoS challenges specifically encountered in video over heterogeneous wireless broadband networks and address several application-driven Wireless MediaNet solutions based on effective cross-layer integration of APP and MAC/PHY layers. More specifically, the congestion control for achieving airtime fairness of video streaming to maximize the link adaptation performance of Wi-Fi, the minimum latency event-driven data exchange for distributed wireless ad-hoc sensor networks, and the opportunistic multicast of scalable video live streaming over mobile WiMAX.     

流媒体传输中的QoS研究及其实现

文中提出的对视频会议的服务质量控制策略是为解决以下问题:视频会议对涉及到的实时数据流传输对网络带宽、时延和丢包率有较高要求,但是,目前得到广泛应用的IP网络是一种尽力而为的网络,它并没有对实时多媒体提供任何服务质量保证。该策略从两个方面对服务质量加以控制:在发送端控制发送流量;在数据再现端通过缓冲机制控制媒体同步。     

H.264 video transmissions over wireless networks: Challenges and solutions

Multimedia video streaming is becoming increasingly popular. Using multimedia services, there are more and more users in end-system over wireless networking environment. H.264/AVC is now the standard for video streaming because of its high compression efficiency, robustness against errors and network-friendly features. However, providing the desired quality of service or improving the transmission efficiency for H.264 video transmissions over wireless networks present numbers of challenges. In this paper, we consider those challenges and survey existing mechanisms based on the protocol layers they work on. Finally, we address some open research issues concerning for H.264 video transmission in wireless networks.     

Ant based Pareto optimal solution for QoS aware energy efficient multicast in wireless networks

Most of the group communication technologies support real-time multimedia applications such as video conferencing and distributed gaming. These applications require quality-of-service (QoS) aware multicast routing protocol to deliver the same data stream to a predefined group of receivers. Since nodes in wireless networks are severely energy constrained due to finite battery source, hence it is of paramount importance that QoS aware multicast routing protocol be energy efficient. Transmission power control is one of the methods used to save energy. In this method, the nodes dynamically adjust the transmission power so that energy consumption in the tree is minimized. However, reduction in the transmission power increases the number of forwarding nodes in the multicast tree. This negatively impacts the QoS in terms of propagation delay, delay jitter, and packet loss etc. In wireless networks, there is a trade-off between the energy consumption and the QoS guarantees provided by the network. We unify these requirements into a multiobjective framework referred to as Energy Efficient QoS Multicast Routing (E²QoSMR). The goal is to simultaneously optimize the total power consumption and the QoS parameters in the multicast tree. We extend two algorithms based on metaphor of swarm intelligence for finding an energy efficient multicast tree satisfying the QoS guarantees. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the correctness and efficiency of the algorithms. The simulation result of the algorithms is compared with the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm, NSGA-III. The experimental results are consolidated by statistical analyses that demonstrate the ability of the algorithms to generate the Pareto optimal solution set.     

QoS Support in TDMA-Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are gaining a lot of attention in research lately due to their importance in enabling mobile wireless nodes to communicate without any existing wired or predetermined infrastructures. Furthermore, in order to support the growing need for multimedia and realtime applications, quality of service (QoS) support by the networking protocol is required. Several important QoS parameters that are needed by such applications can be identified. They include bandwidth, end-to-end delay, delay jitter, and bit error rate. A good amount of research has been developed in this area covering different issues and challenges such as developing routing protocols that support bandwidth reservation and delay management. In this paper, the current state of research for QoS support in TDMA-based MANETs at different layers of the networking model is presented and categorized. In addition, the current issues and future challenges involved in this exciting area of research are also included.     

一种基于TDMA的Ad Hoc网络QoS路由算法研究

随着多媒体应用的普及,服务质量（Quality of Service,QoS）保证已逐渐成为Ad Hoc网络必须支持的一项重要功能,QoS 路由对实现Qos保证起着非常重要的作用,而带宽又是QoS保证的最重要参数之一,因此提出了一种基于TDMA的带宽约束的Ad Hoc网络QoS按需路由协议。该协议采用了启发式的带宽计算算法。仿真结果验证了协议的有效性,表明该QoS路由协议具有较好的端到端性能,可以满足Ad Hoc网络的路由需求。     

无线多媒体传感器网络QoS路由算法研究

由于廉价的CMOS摄像头、麦克风的出现,以及对含有丰富信息的图像,视频和音频信息需求导致了无线多媒体传感器网络-(WMSN)的出现.WMSN具有资源有限、可变的信道容量、数据高度冗余等特点,使得WMSN的QoS路由具有极大的挑战性.提出了一种基于Mesh结构的WMSN,并在该结构体系下,提出了一种基于蚁群算法的QoS路由算法.实验研究表明,蚁群算法具有不依赖全局信息的优点,具有应用于WMSN的前景.实验同时表明,决定蚁群算法收敛速度以及会影响传感器网络性能的一些关键参数较难确定,需要进一步研究.     

无线网状网的QoS研究

作为下一代无线通信网络的关键技术,无线网状网能够融合异构网络,满足多类型的业务需求,因此必须提供一定的服务质量(QoS)保证.对目前各种QoS体系结构进行了分析,讨论了无线网状网的QoS体系结构.针对无线网状网网络层以下各层的QoS问题,对近年来国内外在功率控制、无线环境感知、支持QoS的MAC协议、QoS路由以及跨层QoS设计等方向所取得的研究成果进行了全面的概括总结和比较分析.最后对未来的研究发展趋势提出了自己的观点.     

An adaptive QoS guaranteeing MAC protocol for real-time traffic in TDMA-based wireless ATM networks

This paper presents a new media access control (MAC) protocol based on forward error control (FEC), which is appropriate for supporting real-time traffic with strict QoS requirements in wireless ATM networks. As the channel BER in wireless environments is very high and varying 10⁻⁵–10⁻², previous schemes that use powerful FEC have combated to overcome this noisy channel condition at the cost of valuable bandwidth. As most previous works have been dedicated to maximize the channel efficiency, they were not able to meet QoS requirements of real-time applications in wireless networks. A new MAC protocol proposed in this paper is designed to guarantee the throughput requested by a real-time traffic user while keeping the bandwidth consumption at a minimum. The proposed scheme is for a TDMA system and uses adaptive FEC. We analyze the wireless channel and model it as a two-state error control system to design an efficient MAC protocol. We use simulation experiments to show how the proposed scheme provides QoS guarantees, and compare it with the CDMA system in terms of capacity, i.e. the number of users that can be supported.