Providing quality of service for wireless links: wireless/wired networks

Over the last ten years, a number of scheduling disciplines have been developed to address the problem of providing QoS guarantees in packet-switched networks. When one considers the integration of wireless links with these networks, difficulties arise in their implementation because of the relatively large and time-varying bit error rates of wireless links, due to impairments that are difficult to predict. We address this problem at the (wireless) link level, where we have developed a link access scheme called remote-queuing multiple access (RQMA). RQMA supports the flexible and efficient allocation of bandwidth for real-time sessions in a way that allows the wireless link to be seamlessly integrated with a wired network that supports QoS guarantees. We describe RQMA, and present performance results.