On improving service differentiation under bursty data traffic in wireless networks

The fair queuing model has been widely used to provide QoS for flows sharing a wireless channel. In fluid fair queuing, a flow cannot reclaim its service loss due to absence. As a result, fair queuing models that emulate fluid fair queuing cannot provide good service differentiation under bursty data traffic. On the other hand, strict priority queuing (SPQ) can provide good service differentiation at the cost of QoS provision. To achieve both service differentiation and QoS provision, we propose a new service model called absence compensation fair queuing. The basic idea is to allow a flow to get compensation of its service loss due to absence. Since the proposed service model is based on fair queuing, QoS provision is guaranteed. We first verify these properties by analysis, and then evaluate the performance compared to weighted fair queuing (WFQ) and SPQ. Simulation results show that our service model can provide much better service differentiation than WFQ, and outperforms SPQ in terms of QoS provision.