Efficient Scheduling Algorithms for Real-Time Service on WDM Optical Networks

One of the important issues in the design of future generation high-speed networks is the provision of real-time services to different types of traffic with various time constraints. In this paper we study the problem of providing real-time service to hard and soft real-time messages in Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. We propose a set of scheduling algorithms which prioritize and manage message transmissions in single-hop WDM passive star networks based on specific message time constraints. In particular, we develop time-based priority schemes for scheduling message transmissions in order to increase the real-time performance of a WDM network topology. We formulated an analytical model and conducted extensive discrete-event simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. We compared their performances with that of the state-of-the-art WDM scheduling algorithms which typically do not consider the time constraint of the transmitted messages. This study suggests that when scheduling real-time messages in WDM networks, one has to consider not only the problem of resources allocation in the network but also the problem of sequencing messages based on their time constraints.     

Efficient protocols for multimedia streams on WDMA networks

This paper introduces a new approach to integrate different types of medium access control (MAC) protocols into a single wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) network system. The WDM network is based on a passive star coupler, and the purpose of integrating different MAC protocols is to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and quality of service demands. Our integrated MAC protocol is termed multimedia wavelength-division multiple-access (M-WDMA). Three types of multimedia traffic streams are considered in this paper: constant-bit-rate traffic and two classes of variable-bit-rate traffic. Accordingly, three tunable transmitters and one fixed home channel receiver are used in the design of each WDM node. The transmitters transmit the three types of multimedia traffic streams in a pipeline fashion so as to overcome the tuning time overhead and to support parallel transmissions of traffic streams that emerge simultaneously. We further incorporate a dynamic bandwidth allocation scheme that dynamically adjusts the portions of bandwidth occupied by the three types of traffic streams according to their demands. Consequently the M-WDMA protocol achieves high utilization and efficiently adapts to the demands of the multimedia streams so as to guarantee their QoS. The performance of the M-WDMA is evaluated through a simple analytical model and extensive discrete-event simulations. It is shown that the M-WDMA can satisfy the QoS requirements of various mixes of multimedia traffic streams even under very stringent requirements. Moreover, we show that the M-WDMA outperforms conventional MAC protocols for WDM networks. As a result, we expect M-WDMA to be a good multimedia MAC candidate protocol for future-generation WDM networks.     

保证航电波分复用网络实时性的虚拓扑设计

针对航空电子波分复用网络消息的实时性要求,对航空电子网络的结构进行了研究,分析了在该网络中造成消息延迟的主要因素为转发延迟。进而对航空电子网络建模,根据WDM网络的资源特性进行拓扑的约束,提出了基于综合考虑虚拓扑跳数以及消息的带宽保证为目标的线性规划算法,在此基础上给出了大型网络的一个启发式算法,采用该线性规划算法对NSFNet网络拓扑进行了仿真验证。仿真结果表明,综合考虑虚拓扑跳数和消息带宽能减少消息的延迟,保证了网络实时性。     

A cost-based scheduling algorithm for differentiated service on WDM optical networks

One of the important issues in the design of future generation of high-speed networks is to provide differentiated services to different types of traffic with various time constraints. We propose an adaptive scheme to manage message transmission in single-hop passive-star coupler based wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks. This study suggests that when scheduling message transmission in WDM networks a differentiated service should be considered in order to meet the time constraint to transmission of real-time messages while non real-time messages are being served so that the overall performance of the network could be improved.     

Multimedia—MAC Protocol: Its Performance Analysis and Applications for WDM Networks

Multimedia—MAC Protocol: Its Performance Analysis and Applications for WDM Networks The design of the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol is the most crucial aspect for high-speed and high-performance Local and Metropolitan Area Networks (LANs/MAN's) since the decisions made at this level determines the major functional characteristics of these networks. Most of the MAC protocols proposed in literature are not suitable for multimedia applications since they have been designed with one generic traffic type in mind. As a result, they perform quite well for the traffic types they have been designed for, but poorly for other traffic streams with different characteristics. In this paper, we propose an integrated MAC protocol (herein termed as Multimedia Medium Access Control protocol (Multimedia -MAC) which integrates different MAC protocols into a hybrid protocol in a shared medium network to efficiently accommodate various types of multimedia traffic streams with different characteristics and QoS demands, namely, a constant-bit-rate (CBR) traffic, bursty traffic (say, variable-bit-rate (VBR) traffic) and emergency messages (say, control messages). We have developed a mathematical framework for the analysis and performance evaluation of our Multimedia-MAC protocol which involves a queueing system with vacation. We have applied our Multimedia-MAC design approach to a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network and evaluated its performance under various traffic conditions.     

Medium Access Control for QoS Provisioning in Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communication Networks

The emerging vehicular networks are targeted to provide efficient communications between mobile vehicles and fixed roadside units (RSU), and support mobile multimedia applications and safety services with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we propose a busy tone based medium access control (MAC) protocol with enhanced QoS provisioning for life critical safety services. By using busy tone signals for efficient channel preemption in both contention period (CP) and contention free period (CFP), emergency users can access the wireless channel with strict priority when they compete with multimedia users, and thus achieve the minimal access delay. Furthermore, through efficient transmission coordination on the busy tone channel, contention level can be effectively reduced, and the overall network resource utilization can be improved accordingly. We then develop an analytical model to quantify the medium access delay of emergency messages. Extensive simulations with Network Simulator (NS)-2 validate the analysis and demonstrate that the proposed MAC can guarantee reliable and timely emergency message dissemination in a vehicular network.     

A QoS-aware routing mechanism for multi-channel multi-interface ad-hoc networks

To accommodate real-time multimedia application while satisfying application QoS requirements in a wireless ad-hoc network, we need QoS control mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a new routing mechanism to support real-time multimedia communication by efficiently utilize the limited wireless network capacity. Our mechanism considers a wireless ad-hoc network composed of nodes equipped with multiple network interfaces to each of which a different wireless channel can be assigned. By embedding information about channel usage in control messages of OLSRv2, each node obtains a view of topology and bandwidth information of the whole network. Based on the obtained information, a source node determines a logical path with the maximum available bandwidth to satisfy application QoS requirements. Through simulation experiments, we confirmed that our proposal effectively routed multimedia packets over a logical path avoiding congested links. As a result, the load on a network is well distributed and the network can accommodate more sessions than QOLSR. We also conducted practical experiments using wireless ad-hoc relay nodes with four network interfaces and verified the practicality of our proposal.     

Efficient sequencing techniques for variable-length messages in WDMnetworks

Message sequencing and channel assignment are two important issues that need to be addressed when scheduling variable-length messages in a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) network. Channel assignment addresses the problem of choosing an appropriate data channel via which a message is transmitted to a node. This problem has been addressed extensively in the literature. On the other hand, message sequencing which addresses the order in which messages are sent, has rarely been addressed. In this paper, we propose a set of scheduling techniques for single-hop WDM passive star networks, which address both the sequencing aspect and the assignment aspect of the problem. In particular, we develop two priority schemes for sequencing messages in a WDM network in order to increase the overall performance of the network. We evaluate the proposed algorithms, using analytical modeling and extensive discrete event simulations, by comparing their performance with state-of-the-art scheduling algorithms that only address the assignment problem. We find that significant improvement in performance can be achieved using our scheduling algorithms where message sequencing and channel assignment are simultaneously taken into consideration. This suggests that, when scheduling messages in WDM networks, one has to consider message sequencing, as well as channel assignment. As a result, we anticipate that this research will open new directions into the problem of on-line scheduling in WDM networks     

A delay-based admission control mechanism for multimedia support in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

Multimedia over IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) has recently been the focus of many researchers due to its rapidly increasing popularity. Unlike their best-effort counterparts, multimedia applications have quality of service (QoS) needs typically expressed in terms of the maximum allowed delay and/or the minimum required throughput. Therefore, prior to accepting a multimedia application, the network must assure the satisfaction of its QoS requirements. In this paper, we develop a mechanism that can be used to control the admissibility of multimedia applications into WLANs. To develop the proposed mechanism, we first derive an analytical approximation of the delay experienced by packets when travelled through these networks. The analytical approximation of the delay is then used to propose an admission control mechanism for the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) method used by the hybrid coordination function (HCF) of IEEE 802.11e. The proposed delay-based admission control mechanism is validated via simulations of voice traffic.     

ECBRP: An Efficient Cluster-Based Routing Protocol for Real-Time Multimedia Streaming in MANETs

The dynamic characteristics of wireless networks and stringent QoS requirements of multimedia applications identify significant challenges for providing QoS guarantees for real-time multimedia streaming in such wireless environment. QoS routing protocols can decisively contribute to the QoS provision of network systems. This paper proposes an efficient cluster-based routing protocol (ECBRP) for real-time multimedia streaming in mobile ad hoc networks. First, to improve the stability of clusterheads, we introduce a new algorithm of cluster formation, in consideration of the node mobility and connectivity. Second, a link-broken detection mechanism is designed, which is able to distinguish whether packet loss is due to mobility or congestion, and to make proper reaction. This mechanism contributes to reduce route overhead, and to increase the decodable ratio of video frame at the application layer as well. Third, the routing protocol is enhanced via an adaptive packet salvage strategy, in order to alleviate the congestion in consideration of the characteristics of multimedia traffic. Our simulation experiment results demonstrate that the ECBRP leads to more stable cluster formation than the CBRP, and 80% decreases in the frequency of clusterhead changes against CBRP. As a result, the quality of real-time multimedia streaming is improved significantly, in terms of decodable frame ratio, delay and delay jitter, etc.     

End-to-end quality-of-service coordination for mobile multimedia applications

Transmitting real-time multimedia streams over heterogeneous mobile networks is a challenging task. Variation in network and system conditions can dramatically affect application performance. When providing end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) multiple system facets should be coordinated: orchestration of local and peer resources, reservation of network resources, adaptation of multimedia streams, etc. This paper presents an end-to-end negotiation protocol (E2ENP) for negotiating and coordinating QoS on an end-to-end basis both at application and network layer. Based on a flexible extensible markup language (XML) model and extending SDPng concepts, the protocol enables the negotiation of system capabilities and allows provider-services to effectively influence the negotiation process. The aim of the E2ENP design is to optimize the efficiency of multimedia call setup and reduce the time for QoS renegotiations, whenever vertical handovers or spontaneous network reconfigurations occur. The basic protocol is presented, together with implementation and measurement results, stemming from several studies on current and future third-generation/fourth-generation scenarios.     

Ad Hoc网络中具有QoS保障的同步MAC协议

介绍了Ad Hoc网络中保障实时业务QoS要求的时间同步多址接入协议。该类协议以时分多址为基础,通过资源预留为实时业务预约固定的时隙,赋予实时业务接入信道的优先权,保证了实时业务的接入延时,延时抖动以及吞吐量等QoS指标,为Ad Hoc网络支持多媒体业务的接入奠定了基础。     

Design of a Link Control Protocol for Multimedia Services in Wireless Local Communication

The convergence of wireless systems with multimedia services is the challengeof future generation wireless networks. The large variety of QoS requirementsof different media as well as the maintenance of synchronization of thedifferent streams to be presented at receiver, demand from the Data link layersome extra functionalities. In this paper, we present an enhanced approach forthe efficient management of multimedia applications in third-generationwireless networks. We advocate the use of multiple connections, one for eachtraffic component of the application, as the effective solution for thetransport of multimedia applications in future-generation wireless networks.The effectiveness of this scheme is guaranteed by providing a new link controltechnique that works on top of a PRMA-type access protocol which jointlymanages different streams of a multimedia application. For this purpose, wepropose a two-level priority mechanism (static and dynamic priorities)specified by higher protocol layers for link activation, channel access, andadmission control procedures specific to a multimedia application and foroptimizing the sharing of radio channel resources and management of thereservation queue at the base station. We expect this priority-based mechanismto perform well, especially during periods in which system traffic load ishigh, and to react well to the deterioration of multimedia service quality,in terms of both QoS parameters and the synchronization of its trafficcomponents.     

Providing deterministic packet delays and packet losses in multimedia wireless networks

‘Anytime, anywhere’ communication, information access and processing are much cherished in modern societies because of their ability to bring flexibility, freedom and increased efficiency to individuals and organizations. Wireless communications, by providing ubiquitous and tetherless network connectivity to mobile users, are therefore bound to play a major role in the advancement of our society. Although initial proposals and implementations of wireless communications are generally focused on near‐term voice and electronic messaging applications, it is recognized that future wireless communications will have to evolve towards supporting a wider range of applications, including voice, video, data, images and connections to wired networks. This implies that future wireless networks must provide quality‐of‐service (QoS) guarantees to various multimedia applications in a wireless environment. Typical traffic in multimedia applications can be classified as either Constant‐Bit‐Rate (CBR) traffic or Variable‐Bit‐Rate (VBR) traffic. In particular, scheduling the transmission of VBR multimedia traffic streams in a wireless environment is very challenging and is still an open problem. In general, there are two ways to guarantee the QoS of VBR multimedia streams, either deterministically or statistically. In particular, most connection admission control (CAC) algorithms and medium access control (MAC) protocols that have been proposed for multimedia wireless networks only provide statistical, or soft, QoS guarantees. In this paper, we consider deterministic QoS guarantees in multimedia wireless networks. We propose a method for constructing a packet‐dropping mechanism that is based on a mathematical framework that determines how many packets can be dropped while the required QoS can still be preserved. This is achieved by employing: (1) An accurate traffic characterization of the VBR multimedia traffic streams; (2) A traffic regulator that can provide bounded packet loss and (3) A traffic scheduler that can provide bounded packet delay. The combination of traffic characterization, regulation and scheduling can provide bounded loss and delay deterministically. This is a distinction from traditional deterministic QoS schemes in which a 0% packet loss are always assumed with deterministically bounding the delay. We performed a set of performance evaluation experiments. The results will demonstrate that our proposed QoS guarantee schemes can significantly support more connections than a system, which does not allow any loss, at the same required QoS. Moreover, from our evaluation experiments, we found that the proposed algorithms are able to out‐perform scheduling algorithms adopted in state‐of‐the‐art wireless MAC protocols, for example Mobile Access Scheme Based on Contention and Reservation for ATM (MASCARA) when the worst‐case traffic is being considered. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic adaptation policies to improve quality of service of real-time multimedia applications in IEEE 802.11e WLAN Networks

With the increased popularity of wireless broadband networks and the growing demand for multimedia applications, such as streaming video and teleconferencing, there is a need to support diverse multimedia services over the wireless medium. In order to efficiently address these diverse needs, efforts have been pursued to provide Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms for medium access, resulting in a standard called IEEE 802.11e. One of the enhancements proposed in IEEE 802.11e is a polling-based access mechanism, which is targeted for real-time multimedia flows. In this polling-based scheme, scheduling and time allocation are based on flow reservations. Hence, the effectiveness of the mechanism is heavily dependent on the accuracy of the flow requirements in the reservation. Flow requirements, however, can vary over time and an allocation based on fixed reservations cannot address this variability. This limitation, which is present in the reference scheduler of IEEE 802.11e, leads to degraded multimedia quality for flows with variable requirements, even when channel resources are available. In order to address the above limitation, we present an adaptation framework that dynamically adjusts the polling-based access mechanism and associates flows to different modes of access (polling-based/contention-based), according to the current needs of the application, as opposed to solely relying on the reservation parameters. We demonstrate that with our adaptation, the achieved QoS for real-time multimedia streams, in terms of delay and throughput metrics, can be significantly improved compared to other known mechanisms. Additionally, we show the benefits of our adaptation framework on overall multimedia quality and system capacity. This research is supported by the University of California Discovery Grant (com02-10123) and the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC), University of California, San Diego.     

一种基于分层结构的动态自适应QoS分布控制模型

针对目前IP网实施QoS控制的主要难点问题，本文提出了基于分层结构的动态自适应QoS分布控制模型。本模型借鉴了DiffServ模型中基于端结点的分布控制思想，采用动态自适应的流控机制，这使得本模型不仅具有可扩展性，而且对网络的动态性与异构性具有适应能力。此外，本模型还采用分层结构将基于网络技术、视频编码技术以及FEC容错技术QoS控制策略进行有机集成，在带宽受限的情况下能为媒体流传输提供较好的服务质量。本模型已成功地应用于多媒体同步实时授课系统RealClass中。     

Absolute QoS differentiation in optical burst-switched networks

A number of schemes have been proposed for providing quality-of-service (QoS) differentiation in optical burst-switched (OBS) networks. Most existing schemes are based on a relative QoS model in which the service requirements for a given class of traffic are defined relative to the service requirements of another class of traffic. In this paper, we propose an absolute QoS model in OBS networks which ensures that the loss probability of the guaranteed traffic does not exceed a certain value. We describe two mechanisms for providing loss guarantees at OBS core nodes: an early dropping mechanism, which probabilistically drops the nonguaranteed traffic, and a wavelength grouping mechanism, which provisions necessary wavelengths for the guaranteed traffic. It is shown that integrating these two mechanisms outperforms the stand-alone schemes in providing loss guarantees, as well as reducing the loss experienced by the nonguaranteed traffic. We also discuss admission control and resource provisioning for OBS networks, and propose a path clustering technique to further improve the network-wide loss performance. We develop analytical loss models for the proposed schemes and verify the results by simulation.     

Media Synchronization and QoS Packet Scheduling Algorithms for Wireless Systems

Wireless multimedia synchronization is concerned with distributed multimedia packets such as video, audio, text and graphics being played-out onto the mobile clients via a base station (BS) that services the mobile client with the multimedia packets. Our focus is on improving the Quality of Service (QoS) of the mobile client's on-time-arrival of distributed multimedia packets through network multimedia synchronization. We describe a media synchronization scheme for wireless networks, and we investigate the multimedia packet scheduling algorithms at the base station to accomplish our goal. In this paper, we extend the media synchronization algorithm by investigating four packet scheduling algorithms: First-In-First-Out (FIFO), Highest-Priority-First (PQ), Weighted Fair-Queuing (WFQ) and Round-Robin (RR). We analyze the effect of the four packet scheduling algorithms in terms of multimedia packet delivery time and the delay between concurrent multimedia data streams. We show that the play-out of multimedia units on the mobile clients by the base station plays an important role in enhancing the mobile client's quality of service in terms of intra-stream synchronization and inter-stream synchronization. Our results show that the Round-Robin (RR) packet scheduling algorithm is, by far, the best of the four packet scheduling algorithms in terms of mobile client buffer usage. We analyze the four packet scheduling algorithms and make a correlation between play-out of multimedia packets, by the base station, onto the mobile clients and wireless network multimedia synchronization. We clarify the meaning of buffer usage, buffer overflow, buffer underflow, message complexity and multimedia packet delay in terms of synchronization between distributed multimedia servers, base stations and mobile clients.     

Traffic scheduling in a photonic packet switching system with QoSguarantee

The main challenge in the design of future broadband networks is to efficiently support high-bandwidth multimedia services. Recent advances in the optical networking reveal that all optical networks offering multigigabit rate per wavelength may soon become economical as the underlying backbone in wide area networks, in which photonic switch plays a central role. Two issues are the essential in the design of photonic packet switching, the support of end-to-end virtual connections and the support of diverse quality-of-service (QoS) services. Existing work in wide-area optical networks has largely focused on the former, relatively less attention has been given to support heterogeneous traffic types and to satisfy the potentially different QoS requirements of different types of traffic. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical scheduling framework to use in a class of photonic packet switching systems based on WDM, in which we separate the flow scheduling from the transmission scheduling. We show such separation is essential for achieving scalability such that large input-output ports can be accommodated, and also for offering flexibility in that optimal scheduling algorithms can be derived in different level that can be best tuned to the specific system requirements. The salient feature of the proposed scheduling mechanism is that it takes into account potentially different QoS requirements from different traffic flows. A number of interesting findings are observed from the results obtained by both analysis and simulation: (1) QoS requirements can be satisfied for both real-time and nonreal-time flows; (2) the impact Of the real-time traffic head-of-line (HoL) blocking on the system throughput can be effectively alleviated with the prevailing number of traffic flows. In addition, we investigate a variety of performance measures under different system configurations     

Dynamic Channel Allocation for Real-Time Connections in Highway Macrocellular Networks

The wide deployment of multimedia services in third generation wireless networks will require handoff designs that can simultaneously reduce the blocking probability of handoff requests and decrease the handoff delay. Reducing the handoff blocking probability is needed to prevent frequent call dropping of real-time VBR/VCR connections and decreasing the delay associated with handoff is needed to prevent QoS degradation for multimedia traffic. In this paper, we present a channel assignment/reassignment scheme for highway cellular networks that achieves both requirements. The scheme can be used to deliver real-time data to a large segment of global highways, namely, highways in which the radio channels used in a given cell cannot be simultaneously used in the two neighboring cells to its left and to its right. The scheme possesses the desirable features of real-time algorithms: the execution time per handoff request has a constant time complexity, the number of transmitted messages per request is small, and the space overhead is also O(1). The scheme uses a non-compact initial assignment of nominal channels to neighboring cells and utilizes a set of pointers in each base station to implement an efficient channel assignment and reassignment strategy. The resulting approach greatly simplifies the selection process and avoids the expensive computation and message exchanges typically needed by dynamic channel allocation schemes. The low communication overhead of the scheme can be further reduced via control thresholds. Performance simulation results show that the scheme achieves low blocking probability and is therefore suitable for handling handoffs of real-time connections in highway cellular networks.