Providing deterministic quality of service guarantees in multimedia wireless networks

One major challenge in designing future generation wireless networks is how to provide quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to various multimedia applications. In this paper we consider deterministic quality-of-service guarantees. We propose a method for constructing a packet dropping mechanism that makes decisions as to when we need to drop packets while still not violating any QoS guarantees. This is achieved by employing: 1) An accurate traffic characterization of the VBR multimedia traffic streams; 2) A traffic regulator that can provide bounded packet loss; and 3) A traffic scheduler that can provide bounded packet delay. We performed a set of performance evaluation experiments. The results will demonstrate that our proposed QoS guarantee schemes can significantly support more connections than a system which do not allow any loss at the same required QoS.