Game‐based cross‐layer channel allocation with SVC‐encoded multimedia streams in cognitive radio networks

The available unlicensed spectrum is increasingly being used by new wireless technologies, but past measurements show that the licensed spectrum is extremely underutilized. To address this issue, the IEEE 802.22 Working Group is developing a novel wireless air interface standard based on cognitive radios (CRs), i.e. IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area networks (WRANs). Moreover, over the last decade wireless multimedia applications have developed rapidly, raising significant concerns about the quality of service (QoS) of multimedia stream transmissions. In particular, the Joint Video Team (JVT) and ITU‐T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) jointly proposed Scalable Video Coding (SVC) as the next‐generation multimedia compression standard. However, the current IEEE 802.22 WRAN draft does not specify QoS mechanisms for SVC‐encoded multimedia stream transmission in CR networks. To resolve this problem, we developed a cross‐layer channel allocation algorithm (CLCAA) and a novel media access control (MAC) protocol to work with the algorithm. The CLCAA adapts to the characteristics of multimedia traffic and variations of wireless channels by determining the weighting of source–destination pair, which is determined by the deadlines of SVC‐encoded multimedia streams, the queuing delay and channel conditions. The CLCAA then allocates transmission opportunities to source–destination pairs based on their weightings and game theory. We also conducted extensive simulations to demonstrate the efficiency of the CLCAA scheme. The simulation results show that the CLCAA scheme not only guarantees QoS for multimedia traffic but also achieves fairness across different streams. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

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.     

Wireless ATM networks: technology status and future directions

The concept of “wireless ATM” (WATM), first proposed in 1992, is now being actively considered as a potential framework for new-generation wireless communication networks capable of supporting integrated, quality-of service (QoS) based multimedia services. In this review paper, we outline the technological rationale for wireless ATM, present a system-level architecture, and discuss key design issues for both mobile ATM switching infrastructure and radio access subsystems. The WATM radio access layer issues covered in this paper include: spectrum allocation; spectrum etiquette; modem technology; and medium access/data link control (MAC/DLC) protocols. Mobile ATM aspects such as ATM signaling extensions for handoff control, location management, and mobile QoS control are discussed. A summary of current wireless/mobile ATM technology development and standardization status is given, including an outline of our WATMnet prototype. The paper concludes with a discussion of future directions for wireless ATM technology such as Internet protocol (IP) integration and mobile multimedia terminals/applications     

Delay constraint multipath routing for wireless multimedia ad hoc networks

According to the disadvantages of real time and continuity for multimedia services in ad hoc networks, a delay constraint multipath routing protocol for wireless multimedia ad hoc networks, which can satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirement (QoS multipath optimized link state routing [MOLSR]), is proposed. The protocol firstly detects and analyzes the link delay among the nodes and collects the delay information as the routing metric by HELLO message and topology control message. Then, through using the improved multipath Dijkstra algorithm for path selection, the protocol can gain the minimum delay path from the source node to the other nodes. Finally, when the route is launched, several node‐disjoint or link‐disjoint multipaths will be built through the route computation. The simulation and test results show that QoS‐MOLSR is suitable for large and dense networks with heavy traffic. It can improve the real time and reliability for multimedia transmission in wireless multimedia ad hoc networks. The average end‐to‐end delay of QoS‐MOLSR is four times less than the optimized link state routing. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Medium Access Control for Integrated Multimedia Wireless Access with the Use of a Video Packet Discard Scheme

A well designed Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for wireless networks should provide an efficient mechanism to share the limited bandwidth resources, and satisfy the diverse and usually contradictory Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of each traffic class. In this paper a new MAC protocol for next generation wireless communications is presented and investigated. The protocol uses a combined Packet Discard/Forward Error Correction scheme in order to efficiently integrate MPEG-4 videoconference packet traffic with voice, SMS data and web packet traffic over a noisy wireless channel of high capacity. Our scheme achieves high aggregate channel throughput in all cases of traffic load, while preserving the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of each traffic type, and is shown to clearly outperform DPRMA, another efficient MAC protocol proposed in the literature for multimedia traffic integration over wireless networks. Dr. Polychronis Koutsakis was born in Hania, Greece, in 1974. He received his 5-year Diploma in Electrical Engineering in 1997 from the University of Patras, Greece and his MSc and Ph.D. degrees in Electronic and Computer Engineering in 1999 and 2002, respectively, from the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He was a Visiting Lecturer at the Electronic and Computer Engineering Department of the same University for three years (2003–2006). He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of McMaster University, Canada. His research interests focus on the design, modeling and performance evaluation of computer communication networks, and especially on the design and evaluation of multiple access schemes for multimedia integration over wireless networks, on call admission control and traffic policing schemes for both wireless and wired networks, on multiple access control protocols for mobile satellite networks, wireless sensor networks and powerline networks, and on traffic modeling. Dr. Koutsakis has authored more than 45 peer-reviewed papers in the above mentioned areas, has served as a Guest Editor for an issue of the ACM Mobile Computing and Communications Review, as a TPC member for conferences such as IEEE GLOBECOM, IEEE LCN and IEEE PerCom, will serve as Session Chair for the IEEE GLOBECOM 2006 Symposium on Satellite & Space Communications and serves as a reviewer for most of the major journal publications focused on his research field. Moisis Vafiadis was born in Elefsina, Greece, in 1980. He has recently completed his studies towards the Diploma in Electronic Engineering at the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, Greece. His research interests focus on wireless personal communication networks, and especially on the MAC layer and on the development and testing of wireless multimedia applications.     

Broadband satellite networks-the global IT bridge

Next-generation broadband satellite networks are being developed to carry bursty Internet and multimedia traffic in addition to the traditional circuit-switched traffic (mainly voice) on a global basis. These satellites provide direct network access for personal applications as well as interconnectivity to the terrestrial remote network segments. The main requirement in success of these networks is that they should be able to transmit high data rate traffic with prescribed quality of service (QoS). Thus, the broadband satellite network has no choice other than the rise of ATM technology and to be optimized for Internet-based traffic. ATM is the promising technology for supporting high-speed data transfer potentially suitable for all varieties of private and public telecommunications networks. IP, on the other hand is the fast-growing Internet layer protocol that is applicable over any data link layer Internet-based applications are the emerging source of traffic in the future wireless networks and broadband satellite networks should consider Internet as the primary service. In this paper, we discuss the traditional ATM and wireless ATM networks and explain the characteristics of the wireless IP networks. The paper then uses those concepts in defining the criteria for the broadband satellite networks such as the QoS and traffic management. Application of the broadband satellite networks is also proposed     

Application layer QoS optimization for multimedia transmission over cognitive radio networks

In cognitive radio (CR) networks, the perceived reduction of application layer quality of service (QoS), such as multimedia distortion, by secondary users may impede the success of CR technologies. Most previous work in CR networks ignores application layer QoS. In this paper we take an integrated design approach to jointly optimize multimedia intra refreshing rate, an application layer parameter, together with access strategy, and spectrum sensing for multimedia transmission in a CR system with time varying wireless channels. Primary network usage and channel gain are modeled as a finite state Markov process. With channel sensing and channel state information errors, the system state cannot be directly observed. We formulate the QoS optimization problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). A low complexity dynamic programming framework is presented to obtain the optimal policy. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.     

Modeling and performance analysis of an alternative to IEEE 802.11e Hybrid Control Function

Modern wireless networks are offering a wide range of applications that require the efficient integration of multimedia and traditional data traffic along with QoS provision. The IEEE 802.11e workgroup has standardized a new QoS enhanced access scheme for wireless LANs, namely Hybrid Control Function (HCF). HCF consists of the Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA) and the Hybrid Control Channel Access (HCCA) protocols which manage to ensure QoS support. However, they exhibit specific weaknesses that limit network performance. This work analyzes an alternative protocol, called Priority Oriented Adaptive Polling (POAP). POAP is an integrated channel access mechanism, is collision free, it employs priorities to differentiate traffic in a proportional way, it provides fairness, and generally supports QoS for all types of multimedia applications, while efficiently serving background data traffic. POAP is compared to HCF in order to examine the wireless network performance when serving integrated traffic.     

Providing quality of service in always best connected networks

The next generation of mobile systems is expected to support multiple radio access technologies, as well as diverse types of terminals, including mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and laptops, as well as personal area, moving, and sensor networks. Thus, future wireless systems will not only continue to break technological barriers in terms of new air interface capabilities, higher bit rates, mobility, security, and QoS management, but will present new end-to-end scenarios in which applications access services over multiple L2 hops and multiple IP networks. The term always best connected refers to the concept of defining a set of access selection criteria and mechanisms that allow users to get connected to various services in a nearly optimal manner. Providing QoS in this type of heterogeneous multihop environment is a challenging task because applications may be completely unaware of them scenario and the underlying layer 2 technologies that can be quite different at different hops. For instance, some wireless links may have scarce resources and highly optimized QoS mechanisms; others may not support explicit QoS handling at all. In this article we consider the use of IP-level QoS signaling as a key component to support the end-to-end QoS for various applications. We propose a small set of application programmer- and wirelesslink-friendly IP QoS parameters (wireless hints) and illustrate the use of these in a specific WLAN-to-cellular handover situation. We conclude that the proposed model, signaling protocol, and wireless information elements can efficiently support QoS in heterogeneous mobile environments.     

Perceptive admission control for wireless network quality of service

As wireless networks become more widely used, there is a growing need to support advanced services, such as multimedia streaming and voice over IP. Traditional approaches to guarantee quality of service (QoS) work well only with predictable channel and network access. In wireless mobile networks, where conditions dynamically change as nodes move about the network, a stateless, high level approach is required. Since shared wireless resources are easily over-utilized, the load in the network must be controlled so that an acceptable QoS for real-time applications can be maintained. If minimum real-time requirements are not met, these unusable packets waste scarce bandwidth and hinder other traffic, compounding the problem. To enable high QoS for all admitted traffic, we propose the Perceptive Admission Control (PAC) protocol. PAC monitors the wireless channel and dynamically adapts admission control decisions to enable high network utilization while preventing congestion. Through discussion, simulations and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that PAC ensures low packet loss and delay for all admitted flows.     

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 Distributed Cooperative MAC Protocol for QoS Improvement and Mobility Support in WiMedia Networks

A Distributed Medium Access Control (D-MAC) protocol based on UWB for high-rate Wireless Personal Area Networks is specified by the WiMedia Alliance. D-MAC protocol is suitable for ubiquitous connection in home networks, military/medical applications due to its inexpensive cost, low power consumption, high data rate, and distributed approach. In contrast to IEEE 802.15.3, D-MAC makes all devices have the same functionality. And its networks are self-organized and provide devices with functions such as access to the medium, channel allocation to devices, data transmission, quality of service and synchronization in a distributed manner. D-MAC fundamentally removes the problems of the centralized MAC approach revealed at IEEE 802.15.3 MAC by adopting a distributed architecture. However, the current D-MAC can’t prevent QoS degradations, occurred by mobile nodes with low data rate due to bad channel status, which cause critical problems in QoS provisioning to isochronous streams and mobile applications. Therefore, we propose a distributed cooperative MAC protocol for multi-hop WiMedia networks using virtual MIMO links. Based on instantaneous Channel State Information among WiMedia devices, our proposed protocol can intelligently select the transmission path with higher data rate to provide advanced QoS with minimum delay for real-time multimedia streaming services.     

Dynamic QoS Allocation for Multimedia Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose an approach to support QoS for multimedia applications in ad hoc wireless network. An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile stations forming a temporary network without the aid of any centralized coordinator and is different from cellular networks which require fixed base stations interconnected by a wired backbone. It is useful for some special situations, such as battlefield communications and disaster recovery. The approach we provide uses CSMA/CA medium access protocol and additional reservation and control mechanisms to guarantee quality of service in ad hoc network system. The reason we choose CSMA protocol instead of other MAC protocols is that it is used in most of currently wireless LAN productions. Via QoS routing information and reservation scheme, network resources are dynamically allocated to individual multimedia application connections.     

纯ATM实时多媒体通信系统设计方案

探讨了异构计算环境下的实时多媒体通信以及ATM（异步传输模式）网络上能提供服务保证的高性能宽带多媒体应用，设计了异构环境下基于Native-ATM(纯ATM）方式的实时多媒体通信系统，该系统在两不同的计算机系统之间实现了基于ATM AAL5协议的实时多媒体通信数据流的互通，为异构环境下宽带分布多媒体应用的研究创造了良好的基础。     

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.     

Admission control in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs

Although IEEE 802.11 based wireless local area networks have become more and more popular due to low cost and easy deployment, they can only provide best effort services and do not have quality of service supports for multimedia applications. Recently, a new standard, IEEE 802.11e, has been proposed, which introduces a so-called hybrid coordination function containing two medium access mechanisms: contention-based channel access and controlled channel access. In this article we first give a brief tutorial on the various MAC-layer QoS mechanisms provided by 802.11e. We show that the 802.11e standard provides a very powerful platform for QoS supports in WLANs. Then we provide an extensive survey of recent advances in admission control algorithms/protocols in IEEE 802.11e WLANs. Our survey covers the research work in admission control for both EDCA and HCCA. We show that the new MAC-layer QoS schemes and parameters provided in EDCA and HCCA can be well utilized to fulfill the requirements of admission control so that QoS for multimedia applications can be provided in WLANs. Last, we give a summary of the design of admission control in EDCA and HCCA, and point out the remaining challenges.     

On the performance analysis of the minimum-blocking and bandwidth-reallocation channel-assignment (MBCA/BRCA) methods for quality-of-service routing support in mobile multimedia ad hoc networks

Quality-of-service (QoS) routing is the key to support multimedia services in wireless multihop networks. The goal of QoS routing is to find satisfactory paths that support the end-to-end QoS requirements of the multimedia flows. Previous work has demonstrated a framework for supporting QoS routing in mobile ad hoc networks, where two novel mechanisms for dynamic channel assignment, called the minimum-blocking and bandwidth-reallocation channel-assignment (MBCA/BRCA) algorithms, were proposed. MBCA/BRCA are on-demand channel assignment methods that reactively provide a differentiated service treatment to multimedia traffic flows at the link level using novel techniques for end-to-end path QoS maximization. Efficient QoS routing is then accomplished by giving the routing mechanism access to QoS information, thus coupling the coarse grain (routing) and fine grain (congestion control) resource allocation. In this paper, the specifics and individual mechanisms of the MBCA/BRCA algorithms are presented, whereas their effectiveness and the manner in which they interact in order to contribute to the overall protocol performance is examined and documented. The system performance is studied through simulations experiments under various QoS traffic flows and network scenarios. The protocol's behavior and the changes introduced by variations on some of the mechanisms that make up the protocol is further investigated. As demonstrated, the MBCA/BRCA methods are able to increase system's aggregate traffic by 2.8 Kb/s, on average, comparing to a non-MBCA/BRCA dynamic channel-allocation scheme.     

Cross-layer architecture for scalable video transmission in wireless network

Multimedia applications such as video conference, digital video broadcasting (DVB), and streaming video and audio have been gaining popularity during last years and the trend has been to allocate these services more and more also on mobile users. The demand of quality of service (QoS) for multimedia raises huge challenges on the network design, not only concerning the physical bandwidth but also the protocol design and services. One of the goals for system design is to provide efficient solutions for adaptive multimedia transmission over different access networks in all-IP environment. The joint source and channel coding (JSCC/D) approach has already given promising results in optimizing multimedia transmission. However, in practice, arranging the required control mechanism and delivering the required side information through network and protocol stack have caused problems and quite often the impact of network has been neglected in studies. In this paper we propose efficient cross-layer communication methods and protocol architecture in order to transmit the control information and to optimize the multimedia transmission over wireless and wired IP networks. We also apply this architecture to the more specific case of streaming of scalable video streams. Scalable video coding has been an active research topic recently and it offers simple and flexible solutions for video transmission over heterogeneous networks to heterogeneous terminals. In addition it provides easy adaptation to varying transmission conditions. In this paper we illustrate how scalable video transmission can be improved with efficient use of the proposed cross-layer design, adaptation mechanisms and control information.     

Hybrid QoS based routing protocol for inter and intra wireless mesh infrastructure communications

Quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh networks is an active area of research, which is driven by the increasing demand for real-time and multimedia applications, such as Voice over IP and Video on Demand. In this paper, we propose a novel QoS based routing protocol for wireless mesh infrastructure, called Hybrid QoS Mesh Routing (HQMR). It is composed of two QoS based routing sub-protocols: a reactive multi-metric routing protocol for intra-infrastructure communications and a proactive multi-tree based routing protocol for communications with external networks. The proposed routing protocol enables forwarding real-time and streaming applications with QoS guarantee in a mesh wireless environment, by assigning a specific routing path for each defined service class. To this end, three different QoS service classes are defined, depending on the applications requirements. We analyze in this paper the simulation results of different scenarios conducted on the network simulator ns-3 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the HQMR protocol and to compare it to other routing protocols while forwarding real-time applications with QoS guarantee.     

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.