End-to-end QoS framework for heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks

With information access becoming more and more ubiquitous, there is a need for providing QoS support for communication that spans wired and wireless networks. For the wired side, RSVP/SBM has been widely accepted as a flow reservation scheme in IEEE 802 style LANs. Thus, it would be desirable to investigate the integration of RSVP and a flow reservation scheme in wireless LANs, as an end-to-end solution for QoS guarantee in wired-cum-wireless networks. For this purpose, we propose WRESV, a lightweight RSVP-like flow reservation and admission control scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. Using WRESV, wired/wireless integration can be easily implemented by cross-layer interaction at the Access Point. Main components of the integration are RSVP-WRESV parameter mapping and the initiation of new reservation messages, depending on where senders/receivers are located. In addition, to support smooth roaming of mobile users among different basic service sets (BSS), we devise an efficient handoff scheme that considers both the flow rate demand and network resource availability for continuous QoS support. Furthermore, various optimizations for supporting multicast session and QoS re-negotiation are proposed for better performance improvement. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme is promising in enriching the QoS support of multimedia applications in heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks. Ming Li received his B.S. and M.S. in Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in department of Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas, where he received M.S. degree in Computer Science in Dec. 2001. His research interest includes QoSschemes for mobile ad-hoc networks and multimedia over wireless networks. Hua Zhu received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas. Since 2005, he has been working for San Diego Research Center, Inc., San Diego, CA, as a Research Engineer. His research interests include all layers of wireless communication systems. His particular interest is in L2/3 air interface design, performance analysis, and optimization for ad hoc and sensor networks. Imrich Chlamtac is the President of CREATE-NET and the Bruno Kessler Professor at the University of Trento, Italy. He has held various honorary and chaired professorships in USA and Europe including the Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications Professorship at the University of Texas at Dallas, Sackler Professroship at Tel Aviv University and has been on faculty at Technion, and UMass. Dr. Imrich Chlamtac has made significant contribution to various networking technologies as scientist, educator and entrepreneur. Dr. Chlamtac is the recipient of multiple awards and recognitions including Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the ACM, Fulbright Scholar, the ACM Award for Outstanding Contributions to Research on Mobility and the IEEE Award for Outstanding Technical Contributions to Wireless Personal Communications. Dr. Chlamtac published over three hundred and fifty refereed journal, book, and conference articles and is the co-author of four books. Dr. Chlamtac has widely contributed to the scientific community as founder and Chair of ACM Sigmobile, founder and steering committee chair of some of the lead conferences in networking including Mobicom, OptiComm, Mobiquitous, Broadnets, Securecomm. Dr. Chlamtac also serves as the founding Editor in Chief of the ACM/URSI/Springer Wireless Networks (WINET), the ACM/Springer Journal on Special Topics in Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET). B. Prahbakaran is with the faculty of Computer Science Department, University of Texas at Dallas. He has been working in the area of multimedia systems: animation & multimedia databases, authoring & presentation, resource management, and scalable web-based multimedia presentation servers. Dr. Prabhakaran received the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award in 2003 for his proposal on Animation Databases. He has published several research papers in various refereed conferences and journals in this area. He has served as guest-editor (special issue on Multimedia Authoring and Presentation) for ACM Multimedia Systems journal. He is also serving on the editorial board of Multimedia Tools and Applications journal, Kluwer Academic Publishers. He has also served as program committee member on several multimedia conferences and workshops. B. Prabhakaran has served as a visiting research faculty with the Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park. He also served as a faculty in the Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore as well as in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.