Flexible packet scheduling for quality of service provisioning in wireless networks

This paper presents a novel wireless scheduling mechanism, called Adaptive Service Curve (ASC). The proposed mechanism increases the flexibility with which network operators can adjust the allocation of resources. A good scheduler should exhibit three kinds of flexibility. First, ASC should be able to differentiate the error resilience requirements due to the impact of location-dependent channel errors in wireless networks. Specifically, ASC can employ link adaptation, enabling a choice to be made between maximizing system throughput and making more link effort on error-prone channels. Second, the above flexibility is not system-wide. Rather users can subscribe to different error resilience policies. ASC utilizes the service curve model that can best meet QoS requirements to provide the third kind of flexibility, and prevents an unacceptable over-allocation of radio resources. Accordingly, a framework is proposed to make the existing service curve model operate effectively in wireless environments. The ASC scheduler combines in a single-framework the three aspects of scheduling, namely, link adaptation, flexibility and a mature traffic characterization model. This design represents a complete solution for wireless resource management.