Quality of service with DiffServ architecture in hybrid mesh/relay networks

• Main Author: Lee, Myounghwan
• Published: Georgia Institute of Technology 2010
• Subjects: Hybrid networks; Multi-hop networks; Wireless networks; Quality of service; Computer network architectures; Multimedia communications; Network performance (Telecommunication)
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1853/34694

The objective of this research is to develop an optimized quality of service (QoS) assurance algorithm with the differentiated services (DiffServ) architecture, and a differentiated polling algorithm with efficient bandwidth allocation for QoS assurance in the hybrid multi-hop mesh/relay networks. These wide area networks (WANs), which will employ a connection-based MAC protocol, along with QoS-enabled wireless local area networks (WLANs) that use a contention-based MAC protocol, need to provide an end-to-end QoS guarantee for data communications, particularly QoS-sensitive multimedia communications. Due to the high cost of construction and maintenance of infrastructure in wireless networks, engineers and researchers have focused their investigations on wireless mesh/relay networks with lower cost and high scalability. For current wireless multi-hop networks, an end-to-end QoS guarantee is an important functionality to add, because the demand for real-time multimedia communications has recently been increasing. For real-time multimedia communication in heterogeneous networks, hybrid multi-hop mesh/relay networks using a connection-based MAC protocol, along with QoS-enabled WLANs that use a contention-based MAC protocol can be an effective multi-hop network model , as opposed to multi-hop networks with a contention-based MAC protocol without a QoS mechanism. To provide integrated QoS support for different QoS mechanisms, the design of the cross-layer DiffServ architecture that can be applied in wireless multi-hop mesh/relay networks with WLANs is desirable. For parameterized QoS that requires a specific set of QoS parameters in hybrid multi-hop networks, an optimized QoS assurance algorithm with the DiffServ architecture is proposed here that supports end-to-end QoS through a QoS enhanced WAN for multimedia communications. For a QoS assurance algorithm that requires a minimum per-hop delay, the proper bandwidth to allow the per-hop delay constraint needs to be allocated. Therefore, a polling algorithm with a differentiated strategy at multi-hop routers is proposed here. The proposed polling algorithm at a router differentially computes and distributes the polling rates for routers according to the ratio of multimedia traffic to overall traffic, the number of traffic connections, and the type of polling service. By simulating the architecture and the algorithms proposed in this thesis and by analyzing traffic with the differentiated QoS requirement, it is shown here that the architecture and the algorithms produce an excellent end-to-end QoS guarantee.