An Autonomic QoS-centric Architecture for Integrated Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

In this paper the problem of seamless mobility and proficient joint radio resource management over an all-IP internetworked wireless heterogeneous environment is addressed. Nodes’ autonomicity is envisioned as the enabler to devise a Quality of Service (QoS) aware architecture for supporting a variety of services, founded on a common utility based framework that provides enhanced flexibility in reflecting different access networks’ type of resources and diverse QoS prerequisites, under a unified QoS-aware resource allocation optimization problem. This allows a more in-depth intrinsic wireless network convergence, beyond All-IP, driven by QoS-oriented resource management. This vision is demonstrated and instantiated for integrated WLAN and cellular (both CDMA and OFDMA) networks, providing a viable path towards the evolution and realization of the future wireless networking paradigm. Initial numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture and reveal the benefits of such a service oriented paradigm against other existing access oriented autonomic designs.