Quality of Service Issues in Multi-service Wireless Internet Links

Abstract

Internet application performance over wireless links is disappointing, due to wireless impairments and their adverse interactions with higher protocol layers. In order to effectively address these problems without the need for global protocol upgrades, we focus on link layer enhancement schemes. Simulations reveal that different schemes work best for different applications. We have thus developed a multi-service link layer architecture that can simultaneously enhance the performance of diverse applications by supporting multiple link mechanisms concurrently. Simulations confirm that this architecture provides dramatic performance improvements. The architecture can be embedded in various ways into the Internet. A critical issue for Quality of Service support over wireless links is the unpredictability of available resources. Our approach is based on fair sharing of the link before any measures are taken to improve the performance of individual traffc classes. This approach turns over the error control trade-off to the applications themselves.KeywordsTransmission Control ProtocolWireless LinkInternet ProtocolLink LayerError RecoveryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.