Radio Network Aggregation for 5G Mobile Terminals in Heterogeneous Wireless and Mobile Networks

This paper provides a novel design concept for advanced mobile multi interface terminals with radio network aggregation capability and enhanced quality of service (QoS) provisioning for multimedia services (voice, video and data) in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks. A new module is established which provides the best QoS and lowest cost for any given multimedia service by using simultaneously all available wireless and mobile access networks for a given traffic flow. This novel adaptive QoS module with adaptive QoS routing algorithm is called advanced QoS routing algorithm (AQoSRA), which is defined independently from any existing and future radio access technology. The performance of our proposal is evaluated using simulations and analysis with multi-interface mobile stations with AQoSRA within, carrying multimedia traffic in heterogeneous mobile and wireless environment with coexistence of multiple Radio Access Technologies, such as 3G, 4G as well as future 5G radio access networks. The analysis of the proposed framework for radio networks aggregation in advanced mobile terminals has shown overall better performances regarding the achievable throughput and multimedia access probability in heterogeneous wireless and mobile environment.     

Efficient resource allocation for China's 3G/4G wireless networks

The all-IP DiffServ model is expected to be the most promising architecture for QoS provisioning in China's next-generation wireless networks, due to its scalability, convenience for mobility support, and capability of interworking heterogeneous radio access networks. This article focuses on efficient resource allocation in a wireless DiffServ architecture. Resource utilization efficiency is particularly important for China's wireless networks as the mobile user density in China is and will continue to be much higher than that in other countries. More specifically, we propose a novel buffer sharing scheme to provide assured service for real-time layer-coded multimedia traffic, which can guarantee the specific packet loss requirement of each layer with UDP as the transport layer protocol. An adaptive optimal buffer configuration can be applied to achieve maximum resource utilization over the time-varying channel. Assured service is also provided to TCP data traffic for guaranteed throughput, where the cross-layer coupling between the TCP layer and link layer is exploited to efficiently utilize the wireless resources.     

An optimization framework for balancing throughput and fairness in wireless networks with QoS support

Quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning, high system throughput, and fairness assurance are indispensable for heterogeneous traffic in future wireless broadband networks. With limited radio resources, increasing system throughput and maintaining fairness are conflicting performance metrics, leading to a natural tradeoff between these two measures. Balancing system throughput and fairness is desired. In this paper, we consider an interference-limited wireless network, and derive a generic optimization framework to obtain an optimal relationship of system throughput and fairness with QoS support and efficient resource utilization, by introducing the bargaining floor. From the relationship curve, different degrees of performance tradeoff between throughput and fairness can be obtained by choosing different bargaining floors. In addition, our framework facilitates call admission control to effectively guarantee QoS of. multimedia traffic. The solutions of resource allocation obtained from the optimization framework achieve the pareto optimality, demonstrating efficient use of network resources.     

Optimal Joint Session Admission Control in Integrated WLAN and CDMA Cellular Networks with Vertical Handoff

This paper considers optimizing the utilization of radio resources in a heterogeneous integrated system consisting of two different networks: a wireless local area network (WLAN) and a wideband code division multiple access (CDMA) network. We propose a joint session admission control scheme for multimedia traffic that maximizes overall network revenue with quality of service (QoS) constraints over both the WLAN and the CDMA cellular networks. The WLAN operates under the IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) protocol, which supports QoS for multimedia traffic. A novel concept of effective bandwidth is used in the CDMA network to derive the unified radio resource usage, taking into account both physical layer linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) receivers and characteristics of the packet traffic. Numerical examples illustrate that the network revenue earned in the proposed joint admission control scheme is significantly larger than that when the individual networks are optimized independently with no vertical handoff between them. The revenue gain is also significant over the scheme in which vertical handoff is supported, but admission control is not done jointly. Furthermore, we show that the optimal joint admission control policy is a randomized policy, i.e., sessions are admitted to the system with probabilities in some states     

End-to-End Adaptive QoS Provisioning over GPRS Wireless Mobile Network

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) offers performance guaranteed packet data services to mobile users over wireless frequency-division duplex links with time division multiple access, and core packet data networks. This paper presents a dynamic adaptive guaranteed Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning scheme over GPRS wireless mobile links by proposing a guaranteed QoS media access control (GQ-MAC) protocol and an accompanying adaptive prioritized-handoff call admission control (AP-CAC) protocol to maintain GPRS QoS guarantees under the effect of mobile handoffs. The GQ-MAC protocol supports bounded channel access delay for delay-sensitive traffic, bounded packet loss probability for loss-sensitive traffic, and dynamic adaptive resource allocation for bursty traffic with peak bandwidth allocation adapted to the current queue length. The AP-CAC protocol provides dynamic adaptive prioritized admission by differentiating handoff requests with higher admission priorities over new calls via a dynamic multiple guard channels scheme, which dynamically adapts the capacity reserved for dealing with handoff requests based on the current traffic conditions in the neighboring radio cells. Integrated services (IntServ) QoS provisioning over the IP/ATM-based GPRS core network is realized over a multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) architecture, and mobility is supported over the core network via a novel mobile label-switching tree (MLST) architecture. End-to-end QoS provisioning over the GPRS wireless mobile network is realized by mapping between the IntServ and GPRS QoS requirements, and by extending the AP-CAC protocol from the wireless medium to the core network to provide a unified end-to-end admission control with dynamic adaptive admission priorities.     

Self-regulating network utilization in mobile ad hoc wireless networks

In mobile ad hoc wireless LANs, it is very difficult to maintain a targeted network utilization due to the time-varying nature of the contention-based medium access control protocol and the lack of a central control. Furthermore, previous research has been mainly focusing on the aspect of optimizing the performance at each station. But doing so may result in a very low overall network utilization. Therefore, self-regulating network utilization is very important to provide quality-of-service (QoS) in mobile ad hoc wireless networks. Through self-disciplining its own behaviors locally, each station will optimize its protocol parameters to meet the targeted overall network utilization, which is very important for QoS provisioning to multimedia services. This paper proposes and evaluates a fully distributed scheme for each station to self-regulate its behaviors through adapting the local protocol parameters to meet the targeted overall network utilization with the changes in the network environment such as the number of stations and channel quality.     

Quality-of-service provisioning and efficient resource utilization in CDMA cellular communications

One of the major challenges in supporting multimedia services over Internet protocol (IP)-based code-division multiple-access (CDMA) wireless networks is the quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning with efficient resource utilization. Compared with the circuit-switched voice service in the second-generation CDMA systems (i.e., IS-95), heterogeneous multimedia applications in future IP-based CDMA networks require more complex QoS provisioning and more sophisticated management of the scarce radio resources. This paper provides an overview of the CDMA-related QoS provisioning techniques in the avenues of packet scheduling, power allocation, and network coordination, summarizes state-of-the-art research results, and identifies further research issues.     

Soft QoS in Call Admission Control for Wireless Personal Communications

In wireless multimedia communication systems, call admission control (CAC) is critical for simultaneously achieving a high resource utilization efficiency and maintaining quality-of-service (QoS) to mobile users. User mobility, heterogeneous nature of multimedia traffic, and limited radio spectrum pose significant challenges to CAC. QoS provisioning to both new calls and handoff calls comes with a cost of low resource utilization. This paper proposes a CAC policy for a wireless communication system supporting integrated voice and dataservices. In particular, soft QoS (or relaxed target QoS) is incorporated in the CAC policy to make compromises among different objectives.Numerical results are presented to demonstrate that (a) in dealing with the dilemma between QoS satisfaction and high resource utilization, how the resource utilization efficiency can be increased by introducing soft QoS; and (b) in accommodating different types of traffic, how the QoS of low priority traffic can be improved by specifying soft QoS to high priority traffic.     

A MAC-Layer QoS Provisioning Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks

Due to the proliferation of diverse network devices with multimedia capabilities, there is an increasing need for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in wireless networks. The MAC layer protocol with enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) in the IEEE 802.11-2007 is able to provide differentiated QoS for different traffic types in wireless networks through varying the Arbitration Inter-Frame Spaces (AIFS) and contention window sizes. However, the performance of high priority traffic can be seriously degraded in the presence of strong noise over the wireless channels. Schemes utilizing adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) technique have also been proposed for the provisioning of QoS. They can provide limited protection in the presence of noise but are ineffective in a high noise scenario. Although multiple non-overlapped channels exist in the 2.4 and 5?GHz spectrum, most IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop ad hoc networks today use only a single channel at anytime. As a result, these networks cannot fully exploit the aggregate bandwidth available in the radio spectrum provisioned by the standards. By identifying vacant channels through the use of cognitive radios technique, the noise problem can be mitigated by distributing network traffic across multiple vacant channels to reduce the node density per transmission channel. In this paper, we propose the MAC-Layer QoS Provisioning Protocol (MQPP) for 802.11-based cognitive radio networks (CRNs) which combines adaptive modulation and coding with dynamic spectrum access. Simulation results demonstrate that MQPP can achieve better performance in terms of lower delay and higher throughput.     

Managing IP traffic in radio access networks of next-generation mobile systems

The strong research, standardization, and development activity currently focusing on the enabling technologies for the transition to a new generation of mobile networks represent a great opportunity to accomplish the goal of IP multimedia service provisioning to mobile users. This will contribute to the migration toward an all-IP platform with guaranteed end-to-end QoS provisioning, and will definitively fuel the deployment of new multimedia mobile applications and the further development of multimedia ubiquitous communications. This objective is not easily achievable, mainly due to the difficulties in handling IP multimedia applications in a mobile environment with a guaranteed QoS level. To contribute to this issue, in this article we discuss an evolutionary scenario from the current UMTS system to a next-generation QoS-aware mobile platform based on IP as the transport solution in the radio access network, UTRAN. Furthermore, we propose to fit the IntServ-over-DiffServ approach, in order to best manage the QoS level inside the UTRAN.     

Efficient Radio Resource Management in Integrated WLAN/CDMA Mobile Networks

The complementary characteristics of wireless local area networks (WLANs) and wideband code division multiple access (CDMA) cellular networks make it attractive to integrate these two technologies. How to utilize the overall radio resources optimally in this heterogeneous integrated environment is a challenging issue. This paper proposes an optimal joint session admission control scheme for multimedia traffic that maximizes overall network revenue with quality of service (QoS) constraints over both WLANs and CDMA cellular networks. WLANs operate under IEEE 802.11e medium access control (MAC) protocol, which supports QoS for multimedia traffic. A cross-layer optimization approach is used in CDMA networks taking into account both physical layer linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) receivers and network layer QoS requirements. Numerical examples illustrate that the network revenue earned in the proposed joint admission control scheme is significantly more than that when the individual networks are optimized independently.     

End to end QoS provisioning multimedia wireless/mobile networksusing an adaptive framework

This article presents a framework for multimedia networking in a wireless and mobile environment. We consider both multimedia application needs as well as networking requirements, and try to bridge these paradigms using an adaptive framework. Central to this framework is the concept of representing a multimedia connection in terms of multiple substreams each with their own specified QoS requirement and making network elements (switching and access points), services, and protocols (signaling, control, routing) aware of the QoS requirements of such substreams. As resource availability in the wireless and mobile network fluctuates, the network selects and schedules substreams in order to present the information content with an acceptable quality at a receiver (or each receiver in case of multicast connections). This is done while achieving a reasonable utilization efficiency of network resources and sharing them in a fair manner     

Sensor-based architecture for QoS provisioning and fast handoff management in WLANs

As wireless local area networks gain popularity from network access providers and customers, supporting multimedia applications becomes a crucial yet unresolved challenge. The need to maintain quality-of-service in the presence of bandwidth limitations, increasing traffic volume and user mobility entails radical rethinking in resource management design in WLANs. The unique capabilities of wireless sensor networks constitute a promising research direction to tackle these issues. In this paper, we present a new sensor-based resource management architecture for enhanced QoS provisioning and handoff management in WLANs. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, we show that the framework can maximize bandwidth utilization while satisfying applications’ QoS requirements and significantly reduce handoff latency.     

Transparent IP radio access for next-generation mobile networks

Advances in network architecture, enhancements in signaling protocols, provisioning of end-to-end QoS, worldwide seamless mobility, and flexible service provision are among the major research challenges toward next-generation wireless networks. The integration and interoperability of all these technologies, along with new truly broadband wireless innovations and intelligent user-oriented services will lead toward the so-called 4G wireless networks. In this article we identify the key issues of an innovative transparent IP radio access system that targets 4G networks.     

Optimal network selection in heterogeneous wireless multimedia networks

The complementary characteristics of different wireless networks make it attractive to integrate a wide range of radio access technologies. Most of previous work on integrating heterogeneous wireless networks concentrates on network layer quality of service (QoS), such as blocking probability and utilization, as design criteria. However, from a user’s point of view, application layer QoS, such as multimedia distortion, is an important issue. In this paper, we propose an optimal distributed network selection scheme in heterogeneous wireless networks considering multimedia application layer QoS. Specifically, we formulate the integrated network as a restless bandit system. With this stochastic optimization formulation, the optimal network selection policy is indexable, meaning that the network with the lowest index should be selected. The proposed scheme can be applicable to both tight coupling and loose coupling scenarios in the integration of heterogeneous wireless networks. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme.     

Novel Radio Link Buffer Management Schemes for End-User Multi-class Traffic in High Speed Packet Access Networks

The requirement to provide multimedia services with QoS support in mobile networks has led to standardization and deployment of high speed data access technologies such as the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) system. HSDPA improves downlink packet data and multimedia services support in WCDMA-based cellular networks. As is the trend in emerging wireless access technologies, HSDPA supports end-user multi-class sessions comprising parallel flows with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as real-time (RT) voice or video streaming concurrent with non real-time (NRT) data service being transmitted to the same user, with differentiated queuing at the radio link interface. Hence, in this paper we present and evaluate novel radio link buffer management schemes for QoS control of multimedia traffic comprising concurrent RT and NRT flows in the same HSDPA end-user session. The new buffer management schemes—Enhanced Time Space Priority (E-TSP) and Dynamic Time Space Priority (D-TSP)—are designed to improve radio link and network resource utilization as well as optimize end-to-end QoS performance of both RT and NRT flows in the end-user session. Both schemes are based on a Time-Space Priority (TSP) queuing system, which provides joint delay and loss differentiation between the flows by queuing (partially) loss tolerant RT flow packets for higher transmission priority but with restricted access to the buffer space, whilst allowing unlimited access to the buffer space for delay-tolerant NRT flow but with queuing for lower transmission priority. Experiments by means of extensive system-level HSDPA simulations demonstrates that with the proposed TSP-based radio link buffer management schemes, significant end-to-end QoS performance gains accrue to end-user traffic with simultaneous RT and NRT flows, in addition to improved resource utilization in the radio access network.     

基于多门限预留机制的自适应带宽分配算法

针对异构无线网络融合环境提出了一种基于多门限预留机制的自适应带宽分配算法,从而为多业务提供QoS保证。该算法采用多宿主传输机制,通过预设各个网络中不同业务的带宽分配门限,并基于各个网络中不同业务和用户的带宽分配矩阵,根据业务k支持的传输速率等级需求和网络状态的变化,将自适应带宽分配问题转化为一个动态优化问题并采用迭代方法来求解,在得到各个网络中不同业务和用户优化的带宽分配矩阵的同时,在带宽预留门限和网络容量的约束条件下实现网络实时吞吐量的最大化,以提高整个异构网络带宽的利用效率。数值仿真结果显示,所提算法能够支持满足QoS需求的传输速率等级,减小了新用户接入异构网络的阻塞概率,提高了平均用户接入率并将网络吞吐量最大提高40%。     

A network-assisted flow mobility architecture for optimized mobile medical multimedia transmission

A large part of mobile Health (mHealth) use-cases such as remote patient monitoring/diagnosis, teleconsultation, and guided surgical intervention requires advanced and reliable mobile communication solutions to provide efficient multimedia transmission with strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. The increasing deployment of overlapping wireless access networks enables the possibility to offer the required network resources for ubiquitous and pervasive mHealth services. To address the challenges and support the above use-cases in today’s heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments, we propose a network-assisted flow-based mobility management architecture for optimized real-time mobile medical multimedia communication. The proposed system is empirically evaluated in a Pan-European HetNet testbed with multi-access Android-based mobile devices. We observed that the proposed scheme significantly improves the objective QoE of simultaneous real-time high-resolution electrocardiography and high-definition ultrasound transmissions while also enhances traffic load balancing capabilities of wireless architectures.     

An IP-based QoS architecture for 4G operator scenarios

This article describes a global QoS architecture for multimedia traffic in mobile heterogeneous environments. This architecture supports both multiple access networks and multiple service provider scenarios. The architecture is able to provide QoS per user and per service, implementing the notion of a user profile associated network management in the case of heterogeneous and mobile network access is presented based on cooperative association between QoS brokers and authentication, authorization, accounting, and charging systems. The overall exchange of messages is exemplified for the case of a field test with specific optimizations for voice traffic.     

Adaptive QoS Management for IEEE 802.11 Future Wireless ISPs

Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) are expected to be the new generation of access providers using the emerging IEEE 802.11 technology. Face to the high competition of providing network services, the WISP have to offer the best service to the users. For this purpose, the WISP networks' managers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) with a minimum cost in their wireless networks. The current link layer IEEE 802.11b provides fair sharing of the radio resource with no service differentiation mechanism; similarly to the Internet best effort service. However, the ongoing standard IEEE 802.11e should implement a priority mechanism at the link layer to differentiate the users' traffic. In order to overcome the lack of differentiated mechanism in the current link layer IEEE 802.11b, hence controlling the utilization of the scarce radio resource, we propose in this article to deploy Diffserv architecture coupled with an adaptive provisioning of QoS to provide better services to the users with minimum WISP cost and improve the utilization of the radio resource. Compliant with the current and future IEEE 802.11 link layer, the proposed adaptive QoS provisioning mechanism reacts to the radio resource fluctuation and improves the number of accepted clients in the IEEE 802.11 wireless cells based on the WISP business policies. The network layer differentiation provided by the Diffserv architecture intends to control the concurrent access of the traffic to the scarce radio resources at the IP layer of the mobile hosts for the uplink traffic on one hand, and at the IP layer of the base stations for the downlink traffic on the other hand.