Quality of service provisioning in integrated 3G wireless and wireless LANs with multimedia traffic

Next generation wireless networks can be characterized by the abundance of heterogeneous access technologies ranging from wireless wide and local area networks to wireless personal area and ultra wideband networks. One of the most prominent developments of third generation wide-area cellular networks, UNITS, has an objective to combine various wireless technologies to allow service providers to handoff multimedia or other data traffic from the wide area wireless spectrum to wireless local area and other wireless networks with higher user density and vice versa. In such a multi-access environment, providing personalized quality of service (QoS) for the desired multimedia traffic flow is a crucial task. We present a new handoff mechanism that can provide QoS by allowing mobile users to select among heterogeneous services offered by overlapping third generation UNITS networks and short-distance access technologies. Our handoff mechanism, called MRSVP, discovers multiple, least cost, end-to-end paths between mobile terminals, jointly satisfying the requested QoS.