Traffic multiplexing and service guarantees on a Rayleigh faded wireless downlink

Providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees on wireless networks involves accounting for the statistical fluctuations on wireless channels in addition to the traffic variability of interest in a purely wireline setting. In this paper, we develop a detailed framework for QoS provisioning for delay constrained (real time) applications over a Rayleigh faded wireless downlink. Our link shaping scheme (i.e., the link layer method used to convert a link with frequent, and highly correlated, symbol errors into one with almost wireline-like characteristics) exploits the the natural interleaving provided by packet-by-packet transmissions to different mobiles to break up the error correlations due to fading, and employs forward error correction (FEC) coding on the interleaved data. In addition to considering static bandwidth sharing as in conventional time division multiplexed (TDM) systems, we consider two mechanisms for statistical multiplexing that provide significant capacity gains.