Quality of service support for wireless Internet Service Providers

A large number of Internet service providers (ISPs) view wireless technology as an attractive option to replace all or part of the hard-wired infrastructure that currently dominates the local loop/last mile. Therefore, these ISPs must provide quality of service support to these applications consistent with that offered by the backbone. However, this is a very challenging task in the wireless environment due to the instability of the wireless channel and the diverse quality of service requirements dictated by different multimedia applications. In this paper we Introduce a resource allocation algorithm for the wireless link that distributes information from the ISP facility to the homes. The algorithm takes Into account the wireless channel characteristics, the quality of service required by the applications as well as a pricing value function. Our solution is based on 'time-value' scheduling algorithms originally developed for scheduling real-time processes during transient faults.