Management and Analysis of Multi Class Traffic in Single and Multi-band Systems

Abstract

A recent trend in Internet usage has seen large amounts of multimedia data due to increasingly large numbers of mobile users. To facilitate higher bandwidth, modern mobile routers are capable of supporting simultaneous multi-band, leading to less interference, higher capacity and better reliability. However, there exists neither previous work that attempts to maximize utilization of available bandwidth in order to increase performance of multi-band mobile routers through the sharing of traffic classes among different frequency bands of the multi-band mobile router by scheduling, nor that shows multi-band routers are better than single band routers in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we have proposed a novel scheduling algorithm for multi-band mobile routers which transmits different classes of traffic through different frequency bands to achieve improved performance. We have developed an analytical model to perform queuing analysis of the proposed scheduling algorithm for multi-band mobile routers and derived various performance metrics, validated by extensive simulations. Our results show that the proposed scheduling model can improve performance by ensuring maximum possible utilization through sharing of capacities among the bands in multi-band systems. We show our results by comparing proposed multi-band scheduling model with single and current multi-band scheduling models. In addition, we compare single and multi-band mobile routers. It is evident from our results that multi-band systems are not always better than single band systems although multi-band systems are expected to have better performance. Based on the results, we have listed recommendations for selecting single or multi-band systems and allocation policies according to traffic conditions, and their priorities. Our proposed scheduling algorithms and related analysis will help network engineers build next generation mobile routers with higher throughput and utilization, ensuring less packet loss of different classes of traffic.