Providing deterministic quality of service guarantees in multimedia wireless networks

One major challenge in designing future generation wireless networks is how to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees to various multimedia applications. In this paper we consider deterministic quality of service guarantees. We propose a method for constructing a packet dropping mechanism that makes decisions as to when we need to drop packets while still not violating any QoS guarantees. This is achieved by employing: (1) an accurate traffic characterization of the VBR multimedia traffic streams; (2) a traffic regulator that can provide bounded packet loss; and (3) a traffic scheduler that can provide bounded packet delay. We performed a set of performance evaluation experiments. The results demonstrate that our proposed QoS guarantee schemes can significantly support more connections than a system which do not allow any loss at the same required QoS.