Quality of service scheduling in wireless multimedia communications

It is anticipated that future wireless communications systems will need to support multimedia applications with heterogeneous traffic types. To ensure user performance while maintaining network efficiency, it is important to introduce quality of service (QoS) schemes and optimize wireless channel utilization. A mechanism consisting of a user packet scheduling algorithm for QoS provisioning and a load-balancing algorithm is proposed for wireless multimedia communications. The user QoS guarantee is provided by token bank leaky bucket (TBLB) approach, which keeps track of data service for individual users based on their QoS profile. The proposed scheme extends leaky bucket mechanism to the scheduling of packet transmission in a multiple-channel system, where radio channel re-assignment is performed to balance the traffic load when necessary. This study further evaluates the performance of the proposed mechanism with respect to a variety of traffic models, such as web browsing and realtime packetized voice.