A cross-layer elastic CAC and holistic opportunistic scheduling for QoS support in WiMAX

QoS provisioning is an important issue in the deployment of broadband wireless access networks with real-time and non-real-time traffic integration. An opportunistic MAC (OMAC) combines cross-layer design features with opportunistic scheduling scheme to achieve high system utilization while providing QoS support to various applications. A single scheduling algorithm cannot guarantee all the QoS requirements of traffics without the support of a suitable CAC and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer MAC scheduling framework and a corresponding opportunistic scheduling algorithm in tandem with the CAC algorithm to support QoS in WiMAX point-to-multipoint (PMP) networks. Extensive experimental simulations have been carried out to evaluate the performance of our proposal. The simulation results show that our proposed solution can improve the performance of WiMAX networks in terms of packet delay, packet loss rate and throughput. The proposed CAC scheme can guarantee the admitted connections to meet their QoS requirements.     

Enhanced MAC protocol to support multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks

With the advanced physical layer techniques such as multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), transmission real-time 2D/3D contents and applications becomes more and more necessary in wireless networks for the amazing growing in demand of customers. However, the low efficiency of medium access control (MAC) protocol degrades the performance of real-time traffic greatly in multihop, wireless and mobile environment. Focusing on supporting real-time multimedia traffic in cognitive wireless mesh networks (WMNs), an enhanced MAC protocol is proposed. And the contribution of this paper is twofold: (1) An efficient carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) compatible time division multiple access (TDMA)-like MAC protocol called T-MAC is proposed, which aims to improve the system performance by allocating more channel access time in centralized manner and decreasing overhead. (2) An optimal adaptive scheduling scheme is proposed to support real-time multimedia applications and guarantee QoS for different priority traffic, which aims to find the optimized schedule among all possible sequences of concurrent transmissions by minimizing the occupied resources. Detailed simulation results and comparison with IEEE 802.11e MAC scheme show that the proposed T-MAC can effectively improve quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay and packet loss rate, which also manifests that T-MAC is an efficient multimedia applications transmission scheme for mobile terminals and MAPs in cognitive WMNs.     

Linux下多媒体业务差分IPv6测试平台的设计与实现

为了在无线网络中保证实时多媒体业务的服务质量(QoS),基于IPv6在无线局域网中设计并实现了差分QoS测试平台,实验测试各种支持QoS调度策略。测试平台核心部件为实现差分QoS调度的IPv6路由器。路由器由Linux操作系统来实现,采用可加载内核模块编程,使用Netfilter中钩子函数截获网络数据包,根据业务的不同优先级进行调度,合理分配网络资源,保证实时业务的服务质量。在此平台上,进行了多媒体业务差分QoS的演示和测试。实验表明,测试平台运行稳定,可以为QoS研究提供一个开放式开发测试环境。     

Differentiation, QoS guarantee, and optimization for real-time traffic over one-hop ad hoc networks

Nodes having a self-centrically broadcasting nature of communication form a wireless ad hoc network. Many issues are involved to provide quality of service (QoS) for ad hoc networks, including routing, medium access, resource reservation, mobility management, etc. Previous work mostly focuses on QoS routing with an assumption that the medium access control (MAC) layer can support QoS very well. However, contention-based MAC protocols are adopted in most ad hoc networks since there is no centralized control. QoS support in contention-based MAC layer is a very challenging issue. Carefully designed distributed medium access techniques must be used as foundations for most ad hoc networks. In this paper, we study and enhance distributed medium access techniques for real-time transmissions in the IEEE 802.11 single-hop ad hoc wireless networks. In the IEEE 802.11 MAC, error control adopts positive acknowledgement and retransmission to improve transmission reliability in the wireless medium (WM). However, for real-time multimedia traffic with sensitive delay requirements, retransmitted frames may be too late to be useful due to the fact that the delay of competing the WM is unpredictable. In this paper, we address several MAC issues and QoS issues for delay-sensitive real-time traffic. First, a priority scheme is proposed to differentiate the delay sensitive real-time traffic from the best-effort traffic. In the proposed priority scheme, retransmission is not used for the real-time traffic, and a smaller backoff window size is adopted. Second, we propose several schemes to guarantee QoS requirements. The first scheme is to guarantee frame-dropping probability for the real-time traffic. The second scheme is to guarantee throughput and delay. The last scheme is to guarantee throughput, delay, and frame-dropping probability simultaneously. Finally, we propose adaptive window backoff schemes to optimize throughput with and without QoS constraints.     

一种前向共享信道下多业务的分层混合调度策略

前向采用共享信道方式的系统在承载多种业务时,单一的调度算法很难满足所有业务的QoS需求。在介绍了前向共享信道分组调度的模型后;论文依据不同类别业务的传输需求,提出一种两层的混合调度策略,该策略按业务类别对分组进行分类缓存,并按比例将传输时隙分配到各个数据类,而各数据类采用先到先服务、保证带宽的或是比例公平的调度来实现按用户的分组发送;最后,通过仿真实验对该策略的有效性进行了验证。     

Incorporating packet semantics in scheduling of real-time multimedia streaming

In this work, we develop a novel packet scheduling algorithm that properly incorporates the semantics of a packet. We find that improvement in overall packet loss does not necessarily coincide with improvement in user perceivable QoS. The objective of this work is to develop a packet scheduling mechanism which can improve the user perceivable QoS. We do not focus on improving packet loss, delay, or burstiness. We develop a metric called, “Packet Significance,” that effectively quantifies the importance of a packet that properly incorporates the semantics of a packet from the perspective of compression. Packet significance elaborately incorporates inter-frame, intra-frame information dependency, and the transitive information dependency characteristics of modern compression schemes. We apply packet significance in scheduling the packet. In our context, packet scheduling consists of two technical ingredients: packet selection and interval selection. Under limited network bandwidth availability, it is desirable to transmit the subset of the packets rather than transmitting the entire set of packets. We use a greedy approach in selecting packets for transmission and use packet significance as the selection criteria. In determining the transmission interval of a packet, we incorporate the packet significance. Simulation based experiments with eight video clips were performed. We embed the decoding engine in our simulation software and examine the user perceivable QoS (PSNR). We compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with best effort scheduling scheme and one with simple QoS metric based scheduling scheme. Our Significance-Aware Scheduling scheme (SAPS) effectively incorporates the semantics of a packet and delivers best user perceivable QoS. SAPS can result in more packet loss or burstier traffic. Despite these limitations, SAPS successfully improves the overall user perceivable QoS.     

Upper-level scheduling supporting multimedia traffic in cellular data networks

Wireless data networks such as cdma2000 1x EV-DO and UMTS HSDPA use downlink scheduling that exploits channel fading to increase the system throughput. As future wireless networks will eventually support multimedia and data traffic together, we need a proper criterion for scheduling that can count various service requirements such as delay and packet loss. Although some previous approaches proposed opportunistic schedulers at the lower layer, it has not been investigated well whether they are able to meet explicit QoS defined at the upper layer. Hence, in this paper, we develop a hierarchical scheduling model that considers QoS provisioning and the time-varying channel feature separately. We focus on the upper-level QoS scheduling that supports various traffic classes in a unified manner. Supposing that a user gets some satisfaction or utility when served, we introduce a novel concept of opportunity cost, which is defined as the maximum utility loss among users incurred by serving a particular user at the current turn. We obtain each user’s net profit by subtracting the opportunity cost from its expected utility, and then select a user with the maximum profit for service. Simulation results reveal that our scheme supports various QoS classes well that are represented by delay and packet loss under various traffic loadings.     

Efficient multimedia transmission using adaptive packet bursting for wireless LANs

In addition to an unprecedented 600 Mb/s physical data rate in upcoming standards with greater than 1 Gb/s being considered for future systems, 802.11 has evolved from its earlier incarnations to become a ubiquitous, high-throughput wireless access technology utilized in heterogeneous networks. Although capable of advanced QoS provisioning, commercial 802.11 implementations often support only a subset of QoS specifications, utilize manufacturer-specific QoS enhancements, or use sub-optimal MAC reference specifications with limited capability in achieving optimal system throughput and QoS provisioning.Although more efficient ARQ modes have been defined in the 802.11e and imminent 802.11n amendment standards, opportunities exist within this framework for further optimization through dynamic adaptation of key ARQ-related parameters, which is out of scope of current 802.11 standard specifications. Considering such opportunities, this article presents a novel adaptive ARQ scheme designed to improve the quality and reliability of multimedia transmission through the real-time adaptation of the maximum packet burst size and actual ARQ mode employed. Comprehensive simulation studies show that this scheme can potentially improve the QoS and throughput performance of multimedia traffic in both existing and future 802.11 wireless LANs.     

An adaptive redundancy control method for erasure-code-basedreal-time data transmission over the Internet

We propose an adaptive redundancy control method for erasure-code-based real-time data transmission over the Internet. The loss rate is an important quality of service (QoS) parameter for real-time data transmission. However, real-time data transmission over best-effort networks, such as the Internet, suffers from a frequent packet loss due to traffic congestion. Erasure-code-based loss recovery scheme is widely used for loss recovery on the Internet. We propose a redundancy estimation algorithm which considers consecutive losses since the loss recovery rate depends on the amount of redundancy data. A continuous time Markov chain is used for modeling the loss process and adjusting the number of redundant packets. Measurements and simulation results show that the proposed scheme can be used as an efficient loss recovery algorithm for real-time data transmission over the Internet     

Assured end-to-end QoS through adaptive marking in multi-domain differentiated services networks

The issue of resource management in multi-domain Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks has attracted a lot of attention from researchers who have proposed various provisioning, adaptive marking and admission control schemes. In this paper, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Adaptive Marking (RLAM) approach for providing assured end-to-end quality of service (QoS) in the form of end-to-end delay and throughput assurances, while minimizing packet transmission cost since ‘expensive’ Per Hop Behaviors like Expedited Forwarding (EF) are used only when necessary. The proposed scheme tries to satisfy per flow end-to-end QoS through control action,s which act on flow aggregates in the core of the network. Using an ns2 simulation of a multi-domain DiffServ network with multimedia traffic, the RLAM scheme is shown to be effective in significantly lowering packet transmission costs without sacrificing end-to-end QoS, when compared to the commonly used static marking scheme.     

Delivering relative differentiated services in future high-speed networks using hierarchical dynamic deficit round robin

With the increasing deployment of real-time audio/video services over the Internet, provision of quality of service (QoS) has attracted much attention. When the line rate of future networks upgrades to multi-terabits per second, if routers/switches intend to deliver differentiated services through packet scheduling, the reduction of computational overhead and elimination of bottleneck resulting from memory latency will both become important factors. In addition, the decrease of average queueing delay and provision of small delays for short packets are two further critical factors influencing the delivery of better QoS for real-time applications. The advanced waiting time priority (AWTP) is a timestamp-based packet scheduler which is enhanced from the well-known WTP. Although AWTP considers the effect of packet size, the latency resulting from timestamp access and a great quantity of computational overhead may result in bottlenecks for AWTP being deployed over high-speed links. Many existing schedulers have the same problems. We propose a multi-level hierarchical dynamic deficit round-robin (MLHDDRR) scheduling scheme which is enhanced from the existing dynamic deficit round-robin scheduler. The new scheme can resolve these issues and efficiently provide relative differentiated services under a variety of load conditions. Besides, MLHDDRR can also protect the highest priority traffic from significant performance degradation due to bursts of low-priority traffic. We compare the performance of AWTP with the proposed scheme. Extensive simulation results and complexity analysis are presented to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of MLHDDRR.     

A Resource Reservation Scheme for Synchronized Distributed Multimedia Sessions

Guarantees of services in a networked environment are provided by the proper allocation and scheduling of network and system resources. A lot of research in packet scheduling, QoS routing, traffic multiplexing, etc. has been aimed at providing deterministic or statistical service guarantees, while utilizing resources efficiently. In this paper, we propose a resource reservation scheme for a class of multimedia presentations. We characterize this class of multimedia presentations as synchronized distributed multimedia sessions, which we believe are important components of many multimedia applications. In addition to multimedia presentations, the reservation scheme applies to applications with synchronized resource requirements. Based on resource inquiry and interval analysis, the scheme is also able to find feasible resource allocation schedules for resource reservation requests. Built upon a layer of resource abstraction, the scheme suits well with today's heterogeneous network environment.     

分组交换网络中分布式调度控制算法研究

文章首先对目前分组交换网络中支持QoS的队列调度算法进行了比较研究,分析了其性能指标和技术特点。然后以Internet核心路由器中线卡级和交换级的队列调度设计为例,从控制论的角度提出了一种支持QoS的分布式加权轮询调度控制算法,同时对交换网络进行了仿真实验,吞吐率达到96％的仿真实验结果表明所提出的算法是有效的,最后,文章认为在实际应用中,应针对不同情况设计不同的调度控制算法,以便在复杂性、公平性、快速性及有效性等特性方面取得了一个折衷方案,以使分组交换网络的整体性能更好。     

Providing MAC QoS for multimedia traffic in 802.11e based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks

Ad hoc wireless networks with their widespread deployment, now need to support applications that generate multimedia and real-time traffic. Video, audio, real-time voice over IP, and other multimedia applications require the network to provide guarantees on the Quality of Service (QoS) of the connection. The 802.11e Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol was proposed with the aim of providing QoS support at the MAC layer. The 802.11e performs well in wireless LANs due to the presence of Access Points (APs), but in ad hoc networks, especially multi-hop ones, it is still incapable of supporting multimedia traffic.One of the most important QoS parameters for multimedia and real-time traffic is delay. Our primary goal is to reduce the end-to-end delay, thereby improving the Packet Delivery Ratio of multimedia traffic, that is, the proportion of packets that reach the destination within the deadline, in 802.11e based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks.Our contribution is threefold: first we propose dynamic ReAllocative Priority (ReAP) scheme, wherein the priorities of packets in the MAC queues are not fixed, but keep changing dynamically. We use the laxity and the hop length information to decide the priority of the packet. ReAP improves the PDR by over 28% in comparison with 802.11e, especially under heavy loads. Second, we introduce Adaptive-TXOP (A-TXOP), where transmission opportunity (TXOP) is the time interval during which a node has the right to initiate transmissions. This scheme reduces the delay of video traffic by reducing the number of channel accesses required to transmit large video frames. It involves modifying the TXOP interval dynamically based on the packets in the queue, so that fragments of the same packet are sent in the same TXOP interval. A-TXOP is implemented over ReAP to further improve the performance of video traffic. ReAP with A-TXOP helps in reducing the delay of video traffic by over 27% and further improves the quality of video in comparison with ReAP without A-TXOP. Finally, we have TXOP-sharing, which is aimed at reducing the delay of voice traffic. It involves using the TXOP to transmit to multiple receivers, in order to utilize the TXOP interval fully. It reduces the number of contentions to the channel and thereby reduces the delay of voice traffic by over 14%. A-TXOP is implemented over ReAP to further improve the performance of voice traffic. The three schemes (ReAP, A-TXOP, and TXOP-sharing) work together to improve the performance of multimedia traffic in 802.11e based multi-hop ad hoc wireless networks.     

Admission control scheme based on priority access for wireless LANs

In order to support the quality of service (QoS) requirements at the medium access control (MAC) layer, the enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA) has been developed in IEEE 802.11e standard. However, it cannot guarantee the stringent real-time constraints of multimedia applications such as voice and video without an efficient method of controlling network loads. In this paper, we propose a measurement-based admission control scheme, which is made up of two parts: priority access and admission control. First, in order to measure the channel status per traffic type, we propose a priority access mechanism in which each priority traffic is distinguished by a busy tone, and separately performs its own packet transmission operation. Then, admission control mechanism protects existing flows from new ones, and maintains the QoS of the admitted flows based on the measured channel status information. Performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulation. Our results show that the proposed scheme is very effective in guaranteeing the QoS of multimedia applications as well as in avoiding the performance starvation of low priority traffics.     

AHPS:公平的混合包调度策略

在综合服务模型中非实时通信虽然不要求严格的服务质量保证,但是它承担着绝大多数网络应用,因而传输性能的影响更广泛。目前用于保证实时连接的服务质量的速率比例包调度算法不能公平地处理非实时通信和实时连接,允许实时连接的通信量任意地抢占未预约带宽,使得非实时通信的传输性能恶化。自适应混合包调度算法不仅保证实时连接的服务质量,而且通过限制实时连接的非协议通信量对网络资源的占用,优化了非实时通信的传输性能,提高了带宽资源的效率。     

Above packet level admission control and bandwidth allocation for IEEE 802.16 wireless MAN

IEEE 802.16 wireless Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) is expected to revolutionize the broadband wireless access technology. Efficient resource management is essential in providing scalability in such large IEEE 802.16-based wireless network and Quality of Service (QoS) for multimedia applications (VoIP, MPEG, FTP, WWW) is usually achieved by appropriate classification of scheduling services and grant/request mechanism. In this paper, we firstly discuss the QoS issue in IEEE 802.16 wireless MANs and propose a dynamic admission control scheme for scheduling services defined in the 802.16 specification. The proposed scheme provides the highest priority for Unsolicited Grant Service (UGS) connections and maximizes the bandwidth utilization by employing bandwidth borrowing and degradation. We develop an approximate analytical model to evaluate the system performance by assuming that the traffic processes of all scheduling services are Poisson processes. In fact, the self-similarity of non-voice traffic makes its traffic process far from Poisson process and should be modeled by Poisson Pareto Burst Process (PPBP). Therefore, in the later part of the paper, we analyze upper bound blocking probabilities of all scheduling services above the packet level using PPBP model for fractal traffic and Gaussian model for aggregated traffic in large wireless network as well as using the Chernoff bound method. Based on the analytical results, we give another admission control and bandwidth allocation mechanism above the packet level so as to minimize the blocking probability of each type of service in IEEE 802.16 wireless MAN. Analytical and simulation results are obtained and compared to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed schemes and validate our analytical models.     

基于IP网络的自适应QoS管理方案研究

目前实时音频、视频多媒体应用已经开始进入IP网络,但还有许多问题没有得到很好地解决,其中一个关键问题是多媒体服务的QoS问题、TCP／IP协议本身只提供一种“Best-effort”级别的服务,对QoS支持很少,“Best-effort”级别的服务往往会导致实时应用出现延迟抖动、分组丢失率高,从而极大的影响了实时应用的运行效果,因此必须研究可行的、高效的基于IP网络的QoS控制机制。IP网络QoS已成为分布式多媒体和网络通信的重要研究热点和难点课题。本文在IEＴＦ Intserv与Diffserv相结合的体系结构基础上,提出了一种适用于IP网络的自适应QoS管理框架,与Intserv或Diffserv模型不同的是,该QoS管理框架引入优先级节和自适应概念,QoS俦权处理采用基于多媒体优先级节的算法,在传输控制上采用了自适应QoS控制算法。它在应用层上完成,因此独立于底层网络协议。本文首先讨论了基本概念和函数,然后提出一种基于优先级节的自适应QoS管理框架和优先级调度流程。提出一种基于IP的自适应QoS协商机制,基本思想是基于RSVP（资源预留协议）。在提出QoS请求时进行QoS映射,然后启动适应性函数和资源管理函数进行协商,直到获得一组在当前资源状况下最佳的QoS指标。最后,本文还讨论了此方案的有效性并在自行开发的实验平台GUT上进行的QoS实验。实验表明应用该方法可以根据网络当前状态自适应地整多媒体实时应用的QoS需求。     

An architecture for flexible scheduling in Profibus networks

Recently, much attention has been given to the need to endow industrial communication networks used in real-time systems with flexible scheduling. This allows control systems to adapt to the variations in the requirements of traffic generated by modifications in the environment of the system, or changes in its structure. Another active area is multimedia transmission in industrial environments. In this paper, a flexible scheduling system for Profibus networks is presented. There are two objectives. Firstly to allow the characteristics of real-time traffic to deal in run time in a fieldbus and secondly to enable the scheduling of video traffic for industrial monitoring purposes. The system proposed allows, with regard to traditional Profibus MAC/scheduling, rapid dynamic adaptation to the new requirements, minimizing the bandwidth necessary for its management and maximizing the use of the available bandwidth. As a result there is an improvement in quality of video sources as well as the number of video sources, which can co-exist with the control traffic, without affecting its QoS.     

Using non-preemptive regions and path modification to improve schedulability of real-time traffic over priority-based NoCs

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a preferred communication medium for massively parallel platforms. Fixed-priority based scheduling using virtual-channels is one of the promising solutions to support real-time traffic in on-chip networks. Most of the existing works regarding priority-based NoCs use a flit-level preemptive scheduling. Under such a mechanism, preemptions can only happen between the transmissions of successive flits but not during the transmission of a single flit. In this paper, we present a modified framework where the non-preemptive region of each NoC packet increases from a single flit. Using the proposed approach, the response times of certain traffic flows can be reduced, which can thus improve the schedulability of the whole network. As a result, the utilization of NoCs can be improved by admitting more real-time traffic. Schedulability tests regarding the proposed framework are presented along with the proof of the correctness. Additionally, we also propose a path modification approach on top of the non-preemptive region based method to further improve schedulability. A number of experiments have been performed to evaluate the proposed solutions, where we can observe significant improvement on schedulability compared to the original flit-level preemptive NoCs.