An optimal bandwidth allocation and data droppage scheme for differentiated services in a wireless network

This paper presents an optimal proportional bandwidth allocation and data droppage scheme to provide differentiated services (DiffServ) for downlink pre‐orchestrated multimedia data in a single‐hop wireless network. The proposed resource allocation scheme finds the optimal bandwidth allocation and data drop rates under minimum quality‐of‐service (QoS) constraints. It combines the desirable attributes of relative DiffServ and absolute DiffServ approaches. In contrast to relative DiffServ approach, the proposed scheme guarantees the minimum amount of bandwidth provided to each user without dropping any data at the base‐station, when the network has sufficient resources. If the network does not have sufficient resources to provide minimum bandwidth guarantees to all users without dropping data, the proportional data dropper finds the optimal data drop rates within acceptable levels of QoS and thus avoids the inflexibility of absolute DiffServ approach. The optimal bandwidth allocation and data droppage problems are formulated as constrained nonlinear optimization problems and solved using efficient techniques. Simulations are performed to show that the proposed scheme exhibits the desirable features of absolute and relative DiffServ. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.