End-to-end QoS framework for heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks

With information access becoming more and more ubiquitous, there is a need for providing QoS support for communication that spans wired and wireless networks. For the wired side, RSVP/SBM has been widely accepted as a flow reservation scheme in IEEE 802 style LANs. Thus, it would be desirable to investigate the integration of RSVP and a flow reservation scheme in wireless LANs, as an end-to-end solution for QoS guarantee in wired-cum-wireless networks. For this purpose, we propose WRESV, a lightweight RSVP-like flow reservation and admission control scheme for IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs. Using WRESV, wired/wireless integration can be easily implemented by cross-layer interaction at the Access Point. Main components of the integration are RSVP-WRESV parameter mapping and the initiation of new reservation messages, depending on where senders/receivers are located. In addition, to support smooth roaming of mobile users among different basic service sets (BSS), we devise an efficient handoff scheme that considers both the flow rate demand and network resource availability for continuous QoS support. Furthermore, various optimizations for supporting multicast session and QoS re-negotiation are proposed for better performance improvement. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed scheme is promising in enriching the QoS support of multimedia applications in heterogeneous wired-cum-wireless networks.