Statistical multiplexing and QoS provisioning for real-time traffic on wireless downlinks

Quality of service (QoS) provisioning in wireless networks involves accounting for the statistical fluctuations in the wireless channel quality, in addition to the traffic variability of interest in a purely wireline setting. We consider providing QoS to packetized, delay-constrained (real-time) applications over a Rayleigh-faded wireless downlink. Since the wireless medium is prone to high error rates with typically correlated errors, it is essential to use some kind of link-layer error-recovery mechanism to provide the desired level of reliability. We call this procedure of converting a link with frequent and correlated errors into a near-lossless packet pipe "link shaping." The link-shaping scheme considered in this paper exploits the natural interleaving provided by packet-by-packet transmissions to different mobiles to break up the error correlations due to Rayleigh fading and employs forward error correction (FEC) coding on the interleaved data. In addition to considering static (peak-rate) bandwidth sharing as in conventional wireless downlinks, we propose mechanisms for statistical multiplexing of traffic, which lead to substantial capacity gains. For example, for 13 kb/s voice sources over a 1-Mb/s link, we obtain a two-fold capacity gain over static (peak-rate) bandwidth allocation.