A Unified Architecture for the Design and Evaluation of Wireless Fair Queueing Algorithms

Fair queueing in the wireless domain poses significant challenges due to unique issues in the wireless channel such as location-dependent and bursty channel errors. In this paper, we present a wireless fair service model that captures the scheduling requirements of wireless scheduling algorithms, and present a unified wireless fair queueing architecture in which scheduling algorithms can be designed to achieve wireless fair service. We map seven recently proposed wireless fair scheduling algorithms to the unified architecture, and compare their properties through simulation and analysis. We conclude that some of these algorithms achieve the properties of wireless fair service including short-term and long-term fairness, short-term and long-term throughput bounds, and tight delay bounds for channel access.     

An integrated source transcoding and congestion control paradigmfor video streaming in the Internet

In this work we present an end-to-end optimized video streaming system comprising of synergistic interaction between a source packetization strategy and an efficient and responsive, TCP-friendly congestion control protocol [Linear Increase Multiplicative Decrease with History (LIMD/H)]. The proposed source packetization scheme transforms a scalable/layered video bitstream so as to provide graceful resilience to network packet drops. The congestion control mechanism provides low variation in transmission rate in steady state and at the same time is reactive and provably TCP-friendly. While the two constituent algorithms identified above are novel in their own right, a key aspect of this work is the integration of these algorithms in a simple yet effective framework. This “application-transport” layer interaction approach is used to maximize the expected delivered video quality at the receiver. The integrated framework allows our system to gracefully tolerate and quickly react to sudden changes in the available connection capacity due to the onset of congestion, as verified in our simulations     

Adaptive Quality of Service Support for Packet-Switched Wireless Cellular Networks

In this paper, we propose an adaptive quality of service (QoS) design approach via resource reservation and rate adaptation to support multimedia over wireless cellular networks. Three contributions of this work are: (a) an adaptive QoS model that seeks to provide QoS assurances within bounds for each packet flow and to make advance resource reservation in order to support seamless mobility, (b) a revenue-based resource adaptation design that seeks to maximize network revenue while satisfying the QoS requirements, and (c) a resource reservation protocol that supports both application-initiated resource reservation and network-initiated resource adaptation. Our initial implementation and measurements confirm the effectiveness of the proposed design.     

Design and analysis of an algorithm for fair service in error‐prone wireless channels

In order to support diverse communication‐intensive real‐time and non‐real‐time data flows over a scarce, varying and shared wireless channel with location‐dependent and bursty errors, we define a service model that has the following characteristics: short‐term fairness among flows which perceive a clean channel, long‐term fairness for flows with bounded channel error, worst‐case delay bounds for packets, short‐term throughput bounds for flows with clean channels and long‐term throughput bounds for all flows with bounded channel error, expanded schedulable region, and support for both delay sensitive and error sensitive data flows. We present the wireless fair service algorithm, and show through both analysis and simulation that it achieves the requirements of the service model in typical wireless network environments. The key aspects of the algorithm are the following: (a) an enhanced fair queueing based service scheme that supports decoupling of delay and bandwidth, (b) graceful service compensation for lagging flows and graceful service degradation for leading flows, (c) support for real‐time delay sensitive flows as well as non‐real‐time error sensitive flows, and (d) an implementation within the framework of the simple and robust CSMA/CA wireless medium access protocol. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

WTCP: A Reliable Transport Protocol for Wireless Wide-Area Networks

Wireless wide-area networks (WWANs) are characterized by very low and variable bandwidths, very high and variable delays, significant non-congestion related losses, asymmetric uplink and downlink channels, and occasional blackouts. Additionally, the majority of the latency in a WWAN connection is incurred over the wireless link. Under such operating conditions, most contemporary wireless TCP algorithms do not perform very well. In this paper, we present WTCP, a reliable transport protocol that addresses rate control and reliability over commercial WWAN networks such as CDPD. WTCP is rate-based, uses only end-to-end mechanisms, performs rate control at the receiver, and uses inter-packet delays as the primary metric for rate control. We have implemented and evaluated WTCP over the CDPD network, and also simulated it in the ns-2 simulator. Our results indicate that WTCP can improve on the performance of comparable algorithms such as TCP-NewReno, TCP-Vegas, and Snoop-TCP by between 20% to 200% for typical operating conditions.     

Editorial

Mobile Networks and Applications -     

Scalable service differentiation using purely end-to-end mechanisms: features and limitations

We investigate schemes for achieving service differentiation via weighted end-to-end congestion control mechanisms within the framework of the additive-increase-multiplicative-decrease (AIMD) principle, and study their performance as instantiations of the TCP protocol.Our first approach considers a class of weighted AIMD algorithms. This approach does not scale well in practice because it leads to excessive loss for flows with large weights, thereby causing early timeouts and a reduction in throughput.Our second approach considers a class of loss adaptive weighted AIMD algorithms. This approach scales by an order of magnitude compared to the previous approach, but is more susceptible to short-term unfairness and is sensitive to the accuracy of loss estimates.We conclude that adapting the congestion control parameters to the loss characteristics is critical to scalable service differentiation; on the other hand, estimating loss characteristics using purely end-to-end mechanisms is an inherently difficult problem.     

CEDAR: a core-extraction distributed ad hoc routing algorithm

We present CEDAR, a core-extraction distributed ad hoc routing algorithm for quality-of-service (QoS) routing in ad hoc network environments, CEDAR has three key components: (a) the establishment and maintenance of a self-organizing routing infrastructure called the core for performing route computations; (b) the propagation of the link-state of high bandwidth and stable links in the core through increase/decrease waves; and (c) a QoS-route computation algorithm that is executed at the core nodes using only locally available state. The performance evaluations show that CEDAR is a robust and adaptive QoS routing algorithm that reacts quickly and effectively to the dynamics of the network while still approximating the performance of link-state routing for stable networks     

A Packet Scheduling Approach to QoS Support in Multihop Wireless Networks

Providing packet-level quality of service (QoS) is critical to support both rate-sensitive and delay-sensitive applications in bandwidth-constrained, shared-channel, multihop wireless networks. Packet scheduling has been a very popular paradigm to ensure minimum throughput and bounded delay access for packet flows. This work describes a packet scheduling approach to QoS provisioning in multihop wireless networks. Besides minimum throughput and delay bounds for each flow, our scheduling disciplines seek to achieve fair and maximum allocation of the shared wireless channel bandwidth. However, these two criteria can potentially be in conflict in a generic-topology multihop wireless network where a single logical channel is shared among multiple contending flows and spatial reuse of the channel bandwidth is possible. In this paper, we propose a new scheduling model that addresses this conflict. The main results of this paper are the following: (a) a two-tier service model that provides a minimum fair allocation of the channel bandwidth for each packet flow and additionally maximizes spatial reuse of bandwidth, (b) an ideal centralized packet scheduling algorithm that realizes the above service model, and (c) a practical distributed backoff-based channel contention mechanism that approximates the ideal service within the framework of the CSMA/CA protocol.