Differentiated services QoS issues in next generation radio access network: a new management policy for expedited forwarding per-hop behaviour

In this work, the authors attention is focused on quality of service issues in 3G-beyond radio access networks. Using the differentiated services (DiffServ) approach, considering the characteristics of UMTS traffic, we investigate alternative management policies for expedited forwarding (EF) traffic in an all-IP UMTS terrestrial radio access network (UTRAN). This research work aims at reducing the EF packets loss, with no decrease of the QoS level of other kinds of traffic belonging to the same DiffServ domain. In order to verify the robustness of the proposed policy, an exhaustive simulation campaign has been conducted. The obtained results are very encouraging.