Capacity optimization in multiservice mobile wireless networks with multiple fractional channel reservation

In this paper, the multiple fractional channel reservation (MFCR) strategy for service differentiation is proposed. MFCR overcomes the "integer nature" of traditional channel reservation schemes (also referred to as guard channel, trunk reservation, or cutoff priority) that precludes them to achieve maximum system capacity in single- and multiservice environments. Contrary to the rest of the channel reservation schemes previously proposed in the literature on the topic, MFCR reserves, on average, real numbers of channels to prioritize new and/or handoff calls in multiple service environments. Given a set of requirements on new call blocking and forced termination probabilities for each service type, MFCR maximizes system capacity while meeting the quality of service (QoS) constraints in multiservice mobile cellular networks. It finely controls the communication service quality, by varying the average numbers of reserved channels by a fraction of one. Determining the right amount of resources (cutoff threshold or number of reserved channels) to prioritize each call type and to satisfy all QoS constraints in multiservice environments, however, is a difficult task. Selecting the optimal prioritization order is not an easy process either, as it is affected by QoS constraints, system characteristics, and resource sharing. Thus, an heuristic algorithm to determine the optimum numbers of reserved (resources) channels to achieve maximum system capacity when using the MFCR is also proposed. To our knowledge, the capacity optimization problem considering individual QoS constraints had only been addressed in single service environments. Also, a comprehensive survey on channel reservation strategies proposed in the literature has been included.     

Predictive mobile-oriented channel reservation schemes in wireless cellular networks

Provision of seamless service to multimedia applications in cellular wireless networks largely depends on the way calls are handled during handoff. Hence, sufficient resources must be provided for handoff (HO) connections when a mobile station (MS) moves from one cell to another. Effective allocation of resources can be achieved when the exact future trajectory of MSs is known in advance. However, such a scenario is unrealistic. The next best possibility is to employ user mobility prediction to determine the cell(s) a MS will likely visit in the near future. In this paper, we present an extensive survey and classification of channel (bandwidth) reservation schemes which employ user mobility prediction in the resource reservation process. We also present a survey and classification of call admission control (CAC) schemes, including discussion of prioritized and non-prioritized handoff schemes, which can be useful for researches both in academia and industry.     

Probabilistic call admission control in wireless multiservice networks

A new probabilistic call admission control scheme is proposed for multiservice wireless networks. The new scheme gradually suppresses the admission rate of the new calls and of the calls of each service class (SC) supported considering their priorities independently. The scheme is examined both for a single SC and for multiple SCs under general conditions. The analysis employs Markov chain theory and yields analytical expressions for the call blocking probabilities. The proposed analytical method was validated via simulations employing different distributions for the channel holding time; the simulations demonstrated the accuracy of the proposed framework.     

Group scanning scheme for fast target channel decision in seamless handover of wireless networks

In wireless networks, when a mobile roaming station decides to initiate a handover, it should scan multiple channels operated by neighboring base stations (BSs) (or access points (APs)) in order to find an appropriate target base station before the actual handover. In some wireless networks, the active base station is able to provide a list of channels operated by neighboring base stations. However, some of these candidate channels may not be accessible to the mobile station (MS); nonetheless, the MS scans the candidate channels consecutively. For this reason, it may take a relatively long time for the MS to select an adequate target base station channel. This process can degrade the quality of service (QoS) during handovers. To shorten the scanning latency efficiently, in this paper we propose a cooperative channel scanning method whereby groups of MSs scan candidate channels using a dispersive schedule. They then share the scanning results amongst themselves, which results in a fast handover channel decision. To apply the proposed method to a real network environment, we present a group scanning architecture and detailed application scenarios appropriate for IEEE 802.16e worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) networks. Numerical analyses and simulation results show that our proposed method achieves a shorter target channel scanning latency. Our method is thus more efficient in terms of scanning time and channel selection accuracy. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mathematical analysis of the multi-server queueing model for dynamic channel reservation in wireless networks

We consider a multi-server queueing model with two types of customers offered in Y. C. Kim et al. (1999) for modeling dynamic channel reservation based on mobility in wireless networks. Mathematical analysis given contains essential errors what makes some results negligible. We provide a correct analysis of the model     

Context-aware parallel handover optimization in heterogeneous wireless networks

Annals of Telecommunications - The key idea of this paper is to a use cross-layer triggering concept in order to control the vertical handover (VHO) in heterogeneous networks. Current mobility...     

Service convergence using MPLS multiservice networks

Enterprises are increasingly using virtual private networks to interconnect remote sites. Traditionally, service providers have used ATM core networks to deliver layer 2 services such as frame relay, ATM, or TDM private lines, which enterprise customers have then used to build their corporate network infrastructure. Such services account for the majority of data service revenues today. However, pressure has increased on service providers to combine increased flexibility with reduced costs in the context of a highly dynamic telecommunications market. Service providers also need to generate new revenues from their IP network infrastructure, through new opportunities such as IP VPNs and virtual private LAN services, while simultaneously achieving operational efficiencies through the convergence of all of their services on a common MPLS backbone. New access and metro network technologies, such as Ethernet, are also emerging that can be used to deliver these new services to enterprise customers alongside ATM and frame relay access. This must be achieved while also supporting existing technologies such as ATM, which continue to deliver highly profitable services. This article discusses the technical challenges in meeting the often conflicting requirements of delivering both traditional layer 2 services and new layer 3 services on a converged MPLS network. We show how both network and service interworking are required, and how these must operate at the user, control, and management planes to enable profitable services to be delivered over the new converged network. The different solutions being defined in the standards bodies are described, and the distinct scenarios they address are explained.     

A TDMA MAC protocol for multiservice wireless ad hoc networks

Quality of Service (QoS) provision in wireless ad hoc networks requires the support of efficient MAC protocols and Radio Resource Management strategies to efficiently handle the access process and to achieve a high resource reuse. In this context, we present in this paper a MAC proposal capable of providing resource reservation and service differentiation in the medium access level as a basis for guaranteeing end‐to‐end QoS support in higher levels. We propose a TDMA MAC structure based on a frame subdivision consisting of a broadcast control phase and a data phase. We have designed an adaptive strategy to share the resources between both control and data services and a resource reservation strategy for data services that solves the problems stemmed from the contention for the medium, also adding a service differentiation mechanism based on priorities. In addition, we evaluate the impact of a realistic propagation channel considering multipath fading and users interference on the performance of this scheme. In this scenario, we propose modifications to guarantee the reliability and efficiency of both broadcast control and data services, including power control techniques. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance analysis and overflowed traffic characterization in multiservice hierarchical wireless networks

A cellular hierarchical network with heterogeneous traffic is considered, where calls with shorter (longer) average call-holding time are assigned to the associated lower (upper) layer. The main contribution of this paper is that an efficient and reasonably accurate analytical method is proposed to calculate performance measures of interest, i.e., new call-blocking probability and forced termination probability for conversational services, new call-blocking probability, forced termination probability, and the average number of assigned time slots for streaming services. In particular, a simple two-state MMPP/sup (1,2,...,K)/, that takes into account not only the dependence among overflowed calls of the same class but also the correlation among overflowed calls of different classes, is used to approximate overflowed traffic to reduce computational complexity and improve accuracy. The methods with the multiclass overflowed traffic being approximated as independent Poisson processes and interrupted Poisson processes are also conducted for comparison. Importantly, it is shown via simulation results that the proposed model generates more accurate results than those obtained with the other two approximation methods. Last but not least, the effect of nonuniform traffic density on performance measures is studied via simulation. It is shown that the nonuniform traffic density may have a significant impact on the performance.     

Dynamic channel reservation based on mobility in wireless ATMnetworks

We present a dynamic channel reservation scheme to improve the utilization of wireless network resources while guaranteeing the required QoS of handoff calls. The wireless channels are dynamically reserved by using the request probability determined by the mobility characteristics and channel occupancy to guarantee acceptable quality of handoff calls and keep the new call blocking probability as low as possible     

Dynamic reservation TDMA protocol for wireless ATM networks

A dynamic reservation time division multiple access (DR-TDMA) control protocol that extends the capabilities of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) networks over the wireless channel is proposed in this paper. DR-TDMA combines the advantages of distributed access and centralized control for transporting constant bit rate (CBR), variable bit rate (VBR), and available bit rate (ABR) traffic efficiently over a wireless channel. The contention slots access for reservation requests is governed by the framed pseudo-Bayesian priority (FPBP) Aloha protocol that provides different access priorities to the control packets in order to improve the quality-of-service (QoS) offered to time sensitive connections. DR-TDMA also features a novel integrated resource allocation algorithm that efficiently schedules terminals' reserved access to the wireless ATM channel by considering their requested bandwidth and QoS. Integration of CBR, voice, VBR, data, and control traffic over the wireless ATM channel using the proposed DR-TDMA protocol is considered in this paper. Simulation results are presented to show that the protocol respects the required QoS of each traffic category while providing a highly efficient utilization of approximately 96% for the wireless ATM channel     

Tiered bandwidth reservation scheme for multimedia wireless networks

It is important to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees if we want to support multimedia applications over wireless networks. In this paper, considering the features of tiering in sectored cellular networks, we propose a novel scheme for bandwidth reservation to approach QoS provisioning. By predicting the movement of each connection, the reserving of bandwidth is only required in needful neighboring cells instead of in all neighboring cells. In addition, an admission control mechanism incorporated with bandwidth borrowing assists in distributing scarce wireless bandwidth in more adaptive way. Through mathematical analysis, we proof the advantages of tier‐based approach and the bound for the selection of tiered boundary. The simulation results also verify that our scheme can achieve superior performance than traditional schemes regarding no bandwidth reserving, fixed bandwidth reserving, and bandwidth borrowing in sectored cellular networks when performance metrics are measured in terms of the connection dropping probability (CDP), connection blocking probability (CBP), and bandwidth utilization (BU). Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic-Grouping bandwidth reservation scheme for multimedia wireless networks

In wireless networks carrying multimedia traffic (voice, video, data, and image), it becomes necessary to provide a quality-of-service(QoS) guarantee for multimedia traffic connections supported by the network. In order to provide mobile hosts with high QoS in the next-generation wireless networks, efficient and better bandwidth reservation schemes must be designed. This paper presents a novel dynamic-grouping bandwidth reservation scheme as a solution to support QoS guarantees in the next-generation wireless networks. The proposed scheme is based on the probabilistic resource estimation to provide QoS guarantees for multimedia traffic in wireless cellular networks. We establish several reservation time sections, called groups, according to the mobility information of mobile hosts of each base station. The amount of reserved bandwidth for each base station is dynamically adjusted for each reservation group. We use the dynamic-grouping bandwidth reservation scheme to reduce the connection blocking rate and connection dropping rate, while increasing the bandwidth utilization. The simulation results show that the dynamic-grouping bandwidth reservation scheme provides less connection-blocking rate and less connection-dropping rate and achieves high bandwidth utilization.     

A probabilistic approach for fair-efficient call admission control in wireless multiservice networks

The efficiency of call admission control (CAC) schemes in multiclass wireless networks should be evaluated not only with regard to the call blocking probability (CBP) achieved for every service class (SC) supported but also with regard to quality of service (QoS) and network efficiency criteria. In this article, four CAC schemes offering priority to SCs of advanced QoS requirements, based on guard channel policy, are studied and evaluated taking into account fairness and throughput criteria in addition to CBP. For the performance evaluation of the proposed CAC schemes and to examine fairness issues, two fairness indices are introduced along with a throughput metric. The analytical results, validated through extensive simulations, indicate that by appropriate selection of the CAC parameters satisfactory fairness and throughput are achieved while achieving low CBP.     

A call admission control strategy for multiservice wireless cellular packet networks

A simple connection control system for multiservice cellular wireless networks is presented. Mobile stations are classified depending on the traffic they generate (e.g., voice, data). Within each class, two subclasses are also identified: stations which have originated inside the cell and stations which come from adjacent cells. The connection control mechanism is carried out by considering a number of priorities among the various classes and their subclasses. It works on two levels: static and dynamic. The static level looks at packet-level quality of service (QoS), such as cell loss and delay, while the dynamic level takes care of connection dynamics and allows the load of the system to be driven with respect to the various subclasses. Results that illustrate the performance of this control mechanism are presented.     

Improving TCP performance for vertical handover in heterogeneous wireless networks

The incorporation of wireless local area networks (WLANs) into existing cellular networks as supplementary access technologies has become an issue of great interest. However, vertical handover (VHO), which allows users to roam between a WLAN and a cellular network, causes an abrupt change in certain link characteristics such as the round trip time and data rate. Owing to such changes, reordering problem and premature timeout occur and trigger unnecessarily fast retransmission during VHO, causing throughput degradation. Thus, we propose a new transmission control protocol (TCP) mechanism, which resolves the reordering problem by suppressing unnecessary retransmission caused by spurious duplicate acknowledgments (dupacks) incurred because of the reordering problem, and prevents premature timeout by employing an adaptive retransmission timer. We analytically investigate the throughput of our proposed TCP scheme. The numerical and simulation results show that our proposed TCP performs better in terms of throughput than other schemes appearing in the literature. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A QoE handover architecture for converged heterogeneous wireless networks

The convergence of real-time multimedia applications, the increasing coverage of heterogeneous wireless networks and the ever-growing popularity of mobile devices are leading to an era of mobile human-centric multimedia services. In this scenario, heterogeneous communications will co-exist and ensure that the end-user is always best connected. The rigorous networking demands of wireless multimedia systems, beyond quality-oriented control strategies, are necessary to guarantee the best user experience over time. Therefore, the Quality of Experience (QoE) support, especially for 2D or 3D videos in multi-operator environments, remains a significant challenge and is crucial for the success of multimedia systems. This paper proposes a QoE Handover Architecture for Converged Heterogeneous Wireless Networks, called QoEHand. QoEHand extends the Media Independent Handover (MIH)/IEEE 802.21 with QoE-awareness, seamless mobility and video adaptation by integrating a set of QoE-based decision-making modules into MIH, namely a video quality estimator, a dynamic class of service mapping and content adaptation schemes. The QoEHand video estimator, mapping and adaptation components operate by coordinating information about video characteristics, available wireless resources in IEEE 802.11e and IEEE 802.16e service classes, and QoE-aware human experience. The video quality estimator works without the need for any decoding, which saves time and minimises processing overheads. Simulations were carried out to show the benefits of QoEHand and its impact on user perception by using objective and subjective QoE metrics.     

Optimal admission control in multimedia mobile networks with handover prediction [dependability in the ubiquitous wireless access]

Admission control is one of the key traffic management mechanisms that must be deployed in order to meet the strict requirements for dependability imposed on the services provided by modern wireless networks. We study the problem of optimizing admission control policies in mobile multimedia cellular networks when predictive information regarding the movement of mobile terminals is available. For the optimization process we deploy a novel reinforcement learning approach based on the concept of afterstates. The results obtained define theoretical limits for the gain that can be expected when using handover prediction, which cannot be established by deploying heuristic approaches. Numerical results show that the performance gain is a function of the anticipation time with which the admission controller knows the occurrence of handovers, and an optimal anticipation time exists. We also compare an optimal policy obtained deploying our approach with a previously proposed heuristic prediction scheme, showing that there is still room for technological innovation.