Review of quality of service performance in wireless LANs and 3G multimedia application services

Although, many architectures (Integrated Services, Differentiated Services, MPLS, Traffic Engineering, etc.) have been proposed to provide service differentiation in fixed networks, research has shown that what works well in a wired network cannot be directly applied in the wireless environment where bandwidth is scarce and channel conditions are time varying. Quality of Service (QoS) is a key challenge for today's wireless IP networks and implementation of QoS, particularly for supporting voice, video, data and multimedia services in general incurs a number of difficulties that have to be analysed and resolved. A considerable amount of work has been carried out by the various standards groups in an effort to quantify and specify protocols to support QoS in wireless environments. This paper reports on these efforts outlining existing limitations, requirements and solutions proposed by organisations such as the IEEE 802.11 Task Group E for wireless LANs and the UMTS effort for 3G/wireless WANs. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.