A QoS management framework for 3G wireless networks

The wireless access is expected to be one of the key access technologies for providing IP services to the user, end-to-end seamlessly. The wireless network, as the "last hop" of the wireline IP network has its own unique set of complex characteristics. To improve the behavior of the wireless link susceptible to frequent error bursts (due to fading, shadowing etc.), various low layer (physical/link layer) techniques have to be used to map the service associated network level QoS parameters such as delay, jitter, BER and throughput to meet end-to-end IP performance. The motivation of this paper is two-fold: (i) to present some of the unique characteristics of the radio link and show what kind of flexibility of resource management and mapping techniques required to guarantee QoS over the wireless, and (ii) propose a framework for a wireless QoS agent. The wireless QoS agent, in a nutshell, will be responsible for mapping multimedia IP QoS requirements to radio link specific requirements. The wireless QoS agent will interwork with the IP QoS Manager framework within IETF such as diff-serv in core networks.