Link-level traffic scheduling for providing predictive QoS in wireless multimedia networks

A set of centralized burst-level cell scheduling schemes, namely, First Come First Served with Frame Reservation (FCFS-FR), FCFR-FR+, Earliest Deadline First with Frame Reservation (EDF-FR), EDF-FR+, and Multitraffic Dynamic Reservation (MTDR), are investigated for transmission of multiservice traffic over time division multiple access (TDMA)/time division duplex (TDD) channels in wireless ATM (WATM) networks. In these schemes, the number of time slots allocated to a virtual circuit (VC) during a frame-time is changed dynamically depending on the traffic type, system traffic load, the time of arrival (TOA)/time of expiry (TOE) value of the data burst and data burst length. The performances of these schemes are evaluated by computer simulation for realistic voice, video and data traffic models and their quality-of-service (QoS) requirements in a wireless mobile multimedia network. Both the error-free and the correlated fading channel conditions are considered. Simulation results show that the EDF-FR+ and MTDR schemes outperform the other schemes and can provide high channel utilization with predictive QoS guarantee in a multiservice traffic environment even in the presence of bursty channel errors. The EDF-FR+ scheme is found to provide better cell multiplexing performance than the MTDR scheme, Such a scheme would be easy to implement and would also result in a power conservative TDMA/TDD medium access control (MAC) protocol for broadband wireless access. Burst-level cell scheduling schemes such as EDF-FR+ can be easily adapted as MAC protocols in the emerging differentiated services (DS) enhanced wireless Internet protocol (IP) networks.