Traffic management and QoS provisioning in future wireless IP networks

The huge commercial success of mobile telephony, phenomenal growth of mobile and Internet users, and emerging popularity of IP-based multimedia applications are the major driving forces behind third-generation (3G) evolution. 3G will bring wireline applications, both data and multimedia, into wireless environments. It will operate on IP-based infrastructures to provide wider service access capability. However, current IP is designed for data applications with a single service class, best-effort. Therefore, it is insufficient to support real-time applications that require diverse quality of service (QoS). Although IP can provide greater service flexibility, in terms of spectrum efficiency and QoS, it is not the most appropriate choice in wireless environments. In order to support real-time applications in wireless IP networks, measurement-based admission control (MBAC) is considered. We consider two admission criteria, reservation and priority. The system performance is measured in terms of new call blocking and hand-off call dropping probabilities with three different levels of user mobility: low, moderate, and high level of mobility. Considering the delay-tolerant nature of real-time applications in wireless IP networks, the effect of delay tolerance on the overall system performance is also investigated. We discuss the suitability of MBAC in wireless IP networks by comparing its pros and cons with traditional parameter-based schemes, and then describe its procedures. Next, we discuss simulation details, and present simulation results with discussions. We compare new and hand-off traffic performance with strictly policy-based and policy and traffic characteristic-based admission control schemes. In the conclusion, we briefly discuss the effectiveness of MBAC and its role in 3G and forthcoming 4G networks.