A survey of quality of service in IEEE 802.11 networks

Developed as a simple and cost-effective wireless technology for best effort services, IEEE 802.11 has gained popularity at an unprecedented rate. However, due to the lack of built-in quality of service support, IEEE 802.11 experiences serious challenges in meeting the demands of multimedia services and applications. This article surveys 802.11 QoS schemes, including service differentiation in the MAC layer, admission control and bandwidth reservation in MAC and higher layers, and link adaptation in the physical layer, designed to meet these challenges by providing the necessary enhancements for the required QoS. Furthermore, the article addresses issues that arise when end-to-end QoS has to be guaranteed in today's pervasive heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks. Among these challenges, protocol interoperability, multihop scheduling, full mobility support, and seamless vertical handoff among multiple mobile/wireless interfaces are specifically addressed.     

Lightpath (wavelength) routing in large WDM networks

We address the problem of efficient circuit switching in wide area optical networks. The solution provided is based on finding optimal routes for lightpaths and the new concept of semilightpaths. A lightpath is a fully optical transmission path, while a semilightpath is a transmission path constructed by chaining together several lightpaths, using wavelength conversion at their junctions. A fast and practical algorithm is presented to optimally route lightpaths and semilightpaths taking into account both the cost of using the wavelengths on links and the cost of wavelength conversion. We prove that the running time of the algorithm is the best possible in the wide class of algorithms allowing linear algebraic operations on weights. This class encompasses all known related practical methods. Additionally, our method works for any physical realization of wavelength conversion, independently whether it is done via optoelectronic conversion or in a fully optical way     

Mobility modeling, location tracking, and trajectory prediction inwireless ATM networks

Wireless ATM networks require efficient mobility management to cope with frequent mobile handoff and rerouting of connections. Although much attention has been given in the literature to network architecture design to support wide-area mobility in public ATM networks, little has been done to the important issue of user mobility estimation and prediction to improve the connection reliability and bandwidth efficiency of the underlying system architecture. This paper treats the problem by developing a hierarchical user mobility model that closely represents the movement behavior of a mobile user, and that, when used with appropriate pattern matching and Kalman filtering techniques, yields an accurate location prediction algorithm, HLP, or hierarchical location prediction, which provides necessary information for advance resource reservation and advance optimal route establishment in wireless ATM networks     

Lightpath communications: an approach to high bandwidth opticalWAN's

An architectural approach that meets high bandwidth requirements by introducing a communication architecture based on lightpaths, optical transmission paths in the network, is introduced. Since lightpaths form the building block of the proposed architecture, its performance hinges on their efficient establishment and management. It is shown that although the problem of optimally establishing lightpaths is NP-complete, simple heuristics provide near optimal substitutes for several of the basic problems motivated by a lightpath-based architecture     

The wave expansion approach to broadcasting in multihop radionetworks

An algorithm for efficient communication between neighbours in multihop radio networks is proposed. The algorithm guarantees a bound on the transmission efficiency in a radio channel for arbitrary topology. The algorithm can be embedded in protocols for solving basic network problems such as broadcast, multicast, leader election, or finding shortest paths. The problem of bounded-time broadcasting utilizing the proposed algorithm is addressed. A polynomial solution in which the process of spreading information over the network is viewed as the expansion of a wave caused by a point of disturbance is presented. The broadcast originates at a source node and is accomplished in repeated transmission periods, emulating a wave progressing away from the source. The algorithm is used to select a subset of potential transmitters in each period, so that a tightly bound proportion of potential receivers receive the transmission without collisions, guaranteeing a high level of spatial reuse in the broadcast process     

Mobile number portability

Mobile number portability allows a mobile subscriber to switch operators without changing his/her telephone number. This article describes and analyzes mobile number portability routing mechanisms and their implementation costs. We first describe the signaling relay function (SRF)-based solution for call related and noncall related routing. Then we describe the intelligent network (IN)-based solution for call related routing. Cost recovery issues for number portability are discussed in this article from a technical perspective. We note that rules for cost recovery also depend on business and regulatory factors that vary from country to country.     

Modeling frame synchronization for UMTS high-speed downlink packet access

Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) specification TR 25.950 proposed high-speed downlink packet access for the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS). In this mechanism, an active set of cells is defined for every user equipment (UE) communication session. The cell with the best wireless link quality (called the serving cell) in the active set is selected for communication with the UE. When the wireless link quality of the old serving cell degrades below some threshold, a new serving cell in the active set is selected to continue the communication session. Our previous work proposed a high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) overflow control scheme with four frame synchronization algorithms to switch the serving cell, and formally proved the correctness of the scheme. We propose an analytic model to investigate the performance of these frame synchronization algorithms, and show how the user movement patterns affect the control message delivery costs of these algorithms.     

An adaptive measured-based preassignment scheme withconnection-level QoS support for mobile networks

This paper presents a new adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme to prevent handoff failure in wireless cellular networks, known as the measurement-based preassignment (MPr) technique. This technique is particularly useful in micro/pico cellular networks which offers quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee against call dropping. The proposed MPr scheme distinguishes itself from the well-known guarded channel (GC) based schemes in that it allows the handoff calls to utilize a prereserved channel pool before competing for the shared channels with new call arrivals. The key advantage of the proposed MPr scheme is that it enables easy derivation of the number of channels that needs to be reserved for handoff based on a predetermined handoff dropping probability, without the need for solving the often complex Markov chain required in GC schemes, thus, making the proposed MPr scheme simple and efficient for implementation. This is essential in handling multiple traffic types with potentially different QoS requirements. In addition, the MPr scheme is adaptive in that it can dynamically adjust the number of reserved channels for the handoff according to the periodical measurement of the traffic status within a local cell, thus completely eliminating the signaling overhead for status information exchange among cells mandated in most existing channel allocation schemes. Numerical results and comparisons are given to illustrate the tradeoff     

Message-based priority access to local networks

Hyperchannel interfaces are designed to interface computer mainframes and peripheral equipment to a high speed bus to form a local network. Each interface executes a distributed control contention access algorithm operation revolves about fixed priorities assigned to the individual interfaces. The access algorithm is extended to provide for message-assigned priorities, to provide better bus access rights for higher classes of messages at the expense of degraded access rights for the lower classes of messages. The extension requires little additional new hardware but instead employs a replication in each interface of existing hardware.The original hyperchannel interface access mechanism is explained. The algorithm extension is described and two models are developed to assess its effect on message transmission access rights, and via these models the viability of the extended algorithm can be demonstrated quantitatively.     

BRAM: The Broadcast Recognizing Access Method

In this paper, we first present the broadcast recognizing access method (BRAM), an access protocol suitable for regulating internode communication in either a radio or (coaxial or fiber) cable based communication system. The method avoids collisions, imposes negligible computational requirements on the nodes attempting to transmit, and is fair in the sense that no node will be indefinitely prevented from transmitting. Next we introduce parametric BRAM which attempts to balance the length of inserted channel idle periods, resulting from scheduling effects, against the probability of allowed message collisions. We show that parametric BRAM can be used to realize a method which balances inserted channel idle time against the probability of message collision to yield enhanced performance. For high message loads, parametric BRAM converges to BRAM, while for low and medium loadings it yields throughputs in excess of BRAM, and other methods. Both BRAM and parametric BRAM are discussed under the assumption of homogeneous message arrival rates at the nodes. We conclude by showing how the parametric BRAM can be applied when the nodes operate with heterogeneous or mixed message arrival rates.