Resource cost and QoS achievement in a contract-based resource manager for mobile communications systems

The management of QoS in mobile communications networks has been a popular research topic for many academic and industrial organisations. Many techniques have been developed to route network traffic according to application specific requirements. Consequently, significant contributions have been proposed to improve network operator infrastructures. However, little has been done for the management of QoS from a service provider/application developer perspective. This paper presents an integrated QoS management scheme where management entities, possibly belonging to different administrative parties, can negotiate QoS contracts in a multi-vendor, multi-technology and multimedia environment. The traded commodity, the QoS contract, can be defined in many ways: as a service specific quality contract for the service provider/application developer, as a network specific performance contract for the network operator or as a generic QoS contract for negotiations. In this paper, simulation results show the benefits of link adaptation techniques in the maintenance of QoS contract requirements over lossy wireless links. For that purpose, the TETRA system has been used as an experimental platform.