An Architecture for Service Quality Management Using Cooperative Communications

Abstract

The rapid enhancement and explosive expansion of mobile communication systems will lead to an increased demand for multimedia services. Various multimedia contents will be available due to the proliferation of IPTV, video on demand, user-generated content, and content-centric networking. Therefore, multimedia service quality is becoming a critical issue. The static allocation of network resources may not be sufficient to guarantee the required service quality of multimedia in wireless networks. For ensuring the service quality, it is important to manage the resources considering the overall performance of the network and the end system. In particular, a certain level of service quality should be maintained regardless of the network situation. To achieve this objective, we first propose an architecture for service quality management and then present a detailed framework and mechanisms to maintain the desired service quality using the cooperation between communication entities in wireless networks. Simulation results are also presented to show that the proposed framework works well in wireless networks.