Application-aware service differentiation in PAWNs

We have witnessed the increasing demand for pervasive Internet access from public area wireless networks (PAWNs). The diverse service requirements from end users necessitate an efficient service differentiation mechanism, which should satisfy two goals: end-user fairness and maximizing the utilization of wireless link. However, we found that the existing best-effort based service model is not enough to satisfy either goal. In this paper, we have proposed an application-aware service differentiation mechanism which takes both application semantics and user requirements into consideration. The results show that our proposed method outperforms two other bandwidth allocation approaches, best effort and static allocation, in terms of both client fairness and wireless link bandwidth utilization, especially in heavy load environments.