Application-specific Quality Of Service Research Articles

UniPreCIS: A data preprocessing solution for collocated services on shared IoT

Next-generation smart city applications, attributed to the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber–Physical Systems (CPS), significantly rely on sensing data quality. With an exponential increase in intelligent applications for urban development and enterprises offering sensing-as-a-service these days, it is imperative that a shared sensing infrastructure could thwart the better utilization of resources. However, a shared sensing infrastructure that leverages low-cost sensing devices for a cost-effective solution remains unexplored territory. A significant research effort is still needed to make edge-based data shaping solutions more reliable, feature-rich, and cost-effective while addressing the associated challenges in sharing the sensing infrastructure among multiple collocated services with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Towards this, we propose UniPreCIS, a novel edge-based data preprocessing solution that accounts for the inherent characteristics of low-cost ambient sensors and their exhibited measurement dynamics concerning application-specific QoS. UniPreCISaims to identify and select quality data sources by performing sensor ranking and selection that dynamically adapts to the change in sensor attributes. Finally, multimodal data preprocessing is performed in a unified manner to meet heterogeneous application QoS and, at the same time, reduce the resource consumption footprint for the resource-constrained network edge. We study the effectiveness of UniPreCISon a real-world testbed deployed on our campus. As observed, the processing time and memory utilization of the stakeholder services have been reduced in the proposed approach while achieving up to 90% accuracy, which is arguably significant compared to state-of-the-art sensing techniques.

QoS-Aware Joint Task Scheduling and Resource Allocation in Vehicular Edge Computing

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) has emerged in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) as a new paradigm that offloads computation tasks to Road Side Units (RSU), aiming to thereby reduce the processing delay and resource consumption of vehicles. Ideal computation offloading policies for VEC are expected to achieve both low latency and low energy consumption. Although existing works have made great contributions, they rarely consider the coordination of multiple RSUs and the individual Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of different applications, resulting in suboptimal offloading policies. In this paper we present FEVEC, a Fast and Energy-efficient VEC framework, with the objective of realizing an optimal offloading strategy that minimizes both delay and energy consumption. FEVEC coordinates multiple RSUs and considers the application-specific QoS requirements. We formalize the computation offloading problem as a multi-objective optimization problem by jointly optimizing offloading decisions and resource allocation, which is a mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem and NP-hard. We propose MOV, a Multi-Objective computing offloading method for VEC. First, vehicle prejudgment is proposed to meet the requirements of different applications by considering the maximum tolerance delay related to the current vehicle speed. Second, an improved Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) is adopted to obtain the Pareto-optimal solutions with low complexity. Finally, the optimal offloading strategy is selected for QoS maximization. Extensive evaluation results based on real and simulated vehicle trajectories verify that the average QoS value of MOV is improved by 20% compared with the state-of-the-art VEC mechanism.

Fuzzy-MAC: An FIS based MAC protocol for a multi-constrained traffic in wireless body area networks

In this paper, we introduce Fuzzy-MAC protocol to facilitate the uniform transmission of the multi-constrained data generated by the sensor devices in a wireless body area network (WBAN). A physiological sensor device allows us to monitor various health-related parameters. In the process, the sensed data become associated with diverse Quality of Service (QoS)-specific constraints depending on the application requirements, thus imposing a challenge in front of the enabling communication protocols such as IEEE 802.15.4. To deal with these multi-constrained traffic data, Fuzzy-MAC first categorizes the sensor data according to the application-specific QoS requirements. Moreover, improved channel access mechanisms are applied according to the priority class value assigned to the different data types. Lastly, employing a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS), Fuzzy-MAC brings context-awareness to a health monitoring environment. We conduct rigorous simulations of the proposed Fuzzy-MAC to justify the competence with the existing literature. The results show that the proposed MAC protocol outperforms the benchmarks in terms of throughput, average delay, and overall reliability of a WBAN.

Q-Soft: QoS-Aware Traffic Forwarding in Software-Defined Cyber–Physical Systems

The next-generation cyber–physical systems (CPSs) with heterogeneous applications have diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in terms of throughput, end-to-end latency, and packet drop reliability. To meet such diverse QoS requirements, in this article, we propose a QoS-aware traffic forwarding scheme in software-defined CPS. The proposed scheme is presented as a two-stage optimization framework to minimize the associated costs in traffic forwarding. In the first stage, we aim to minimize the required number of “candidate” switches for a given network to minimize network deployment costs. In the second stage, we design a comprehensive cost function considering end-to-end delay, flow-rule utilization, and link utilization in the network. Based on the designed cost function, we formulate another optimization problem for optimal traffic forwarding (OTF). As solving OTF is NP-hard, we propose an efficient greedy-heuristic approach to solve the problem while considering application-specific QoS requirements. Further, we propose a packet-tagging method to assist the controller in mitigating rule congestion at the software-defined networking devices, and hence improve the overall network performance. Extensive results show that the proposed scheme minimizes the network delay and QoS-violated flows by up to 50% and 90%, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art schemes.

Plug-in over Plug-in Evaluation in Heterogeneous 5G Enabled Networks and Beyond

With the cool upcoming wave of 5G, currently, the networking and telecommunication industries are facing various digital transformations, which are changing the very fundamental nature of the existing network management infrastructure. Besides the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, we also notice that the 5G network in itself is composed of millions of heterogeneous physical entities and nodes, multiple domains, complex protocols and technologies, different gateways, and so on. This heterogeneity imposes critical impacts on the application specific quality of service (QoS) requirements, performance and utilization of network resources, and data and user security. In order to alleviate the above impacts, researchers propose to use different technologies such as software-defined networking, network function virtualization, blockchain, and artificial intelligence in 5G-enabled IoT networking. We notice that the layers over layers (of protocols and technologies) act like a plug-in over plug-in (PoP) in the network in order to accomplish various aims, including meeting QoS demands, enhancing security, load balancing, and so on. On one hand, we agree that this integration of different technologies in 5G networks bring numerous advantages, but on the other hand, we realize that this has posed a lot of unique critical issues in modern 5G network management. In this article, we point out that this straightforward approach of PoP is eventually not a healthy approach for network transformation. In this regard, using open source MANO (OSM), we provide a proof of concept (PoC) to show that at varying degrees of heterogeneity, PoP adds the delay in the VNF deployment process and further impacts the VIM CPU performance. This eventually affects the QoS requirements of IoT nodes or applications. Following this, we propose a high-level holistic approach that helps to alleviate the PoP issue. Finally, in this context, we also discuss the associated challenges and research opportunities.

A Method for Enabling Context-Awareness at Transport Layer for Improved Quality-of-Service Control

As the 5G systems have introduced network slicing on the virtualized network environment, application-specific QoS (Quality of Service) management has come to the fore to support a range of services, such as eMBB (enhanced Mobile Broadband), URLLC (Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications), and mIoT (massive Internet of Things). It is expected for the next-generation systems to support more diverse applications demanding newer and granular quality characteristics for network services. Most of the current transport layer protocols, built on layering design and best-effort paradigm, do not provide the necessary precision and adaptability required for various QoS support. Therefore, we need new protocols that comprehend application behaviours and adapt to dynamic network conditions for more fine-grained QoS enhancement. This paper presents a Context-oriented Transport (CoT) layer for the next-generation network that understands the application context and adapts to varying network conditions with flow-based QoS control. CoT is an end-to-end software solution that improves the underlying network capacity utilization and prioritizes the traffic flows according to quality needs. We prototyped CoT in Linux/Android devices and evaluated the performance with emulated traffic environment. The experiments show that CoT reduces latency by up to 16.5% and improves average throughput by up to 30%, compared with Android 10 in LTE network, resulting from enhanced traffic classification and network utilization.

Clustering-cum-Handover Management Scheme for improved Internet access in high-density mobile wireless environments

The accessibility of ubiquitous communication services from various wireless technologies has become essential in the current Internet of everything (IoE) era. It is crucial for mobile users residing in densely populated areas to get the provision of uninterrupted connectivity and seamless services. To this end, this paper provides a mechanism for uninterrupted connectivity to a maximum number of users with the available resources. We propose a master/slave model in a 4G-Wi-Fi integrated network. Our novel Clustering-cum-Handover Management Scheme (CHMS) for dynamic cluster management together with the handover management in high density mobile wireless environment dispenses the unrestricted movement without connectivity loss and quality sacrifice. The dynamically configured clustering protocol of CHMS provides reduced cluster formation overhead and balances the load between cluster heads. To make smart selections, a distance-based energy-efficient clustering scheme is proposed for calculating the chances of a mobile device to become a cluster head. The seamless handover mechanism of CHMS manages the mobility of both the cluster head and cluster member while considering the limited energy of devices. It also achieves high network throughput and reduced end-to-end delay during handovers. Furthermore, our evaluation shows that CHMS provides application-specific quality of service even in highly dense wireless environments.

Cross Layer QoS Guaranteed Fault Tolerance for Data Transmission in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor network comprises several small nodes distributed randomly in an area under observation. These nodes sense the assigned physical phenomenon occurring around it and reports back to the base station. WSN is increasingly applied in defense, industrial, health care applications etc. Some applications envisage movement of the nodes. This results in frequent alteration of network topology leading to dynamic network partitioning. Hence, the routing of data from source to sink faces more routing disruptions. Maintaining application specific quality of service (QoS) in terms of Packet delivery ratio in such Mobile wireless sensor network (MWSN) environment is a daunting task. This cannot be achieved by focusing on a solution in only a single layer of sensor network protocol stack. Instead, by incorporating different techniques in each layered OSI protocol stack, a single coherent framework is proposed in this paper. This paper proposes prediction based coding in application layer, opportunistic routing in network layer, Laplacian scaling based on round trip time measurement in session layer. The proposed cross layer solution ensures application specific QoS guaranteed fault tolerance in MWSN.

QoS mechanisms for MAC protocols in wireless sensor networks: a survey

With the rapid development in ubiquitous smart sensors, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have started to evolve into numerous applications including healthcare, military, agriculture, transportation, industry, internet of things (IOT), and smart cities. However, satisfying quality of service (QoS) requirements of various application domains remains a challenging issue due to the heterogeneous traffic flows, dynamic network conditions, and resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes. In this regard, application-specific QoS provisioning techniques have received considerable research attention at the medium access control (MAC) layer. This study presents a systematic review of the QoS mechanisms employed at the MAC layer in WSN and also highlights their open research issues. In addition, the survey presents a comparative analysis of various QoS-aware MAC protocols with emphasis on their strengths and limitations. Finally, this survey discusses various potential directions for future research in the field of QoS provisioning at the MAC layer.

Analysis and Design of a Latency Control Protocol for Multi-Path Data Delivery With Pre-Defined QoS Guarantees

As the capacity and reliability of mobile networks increases, so does the demand for more responsive end-to-end services: applications such as augmented reality, live video conferencing, and smart or autonomous vehicles require reliable, throughput-intensive end-to-end communications with strict delay constraints. Only consistently reliable delivery of data flows well within human interactivity deadlines will enable a truly immersive user experience. To enable data delivery within pre-defined deadlines, controlled on demand by an application or its user, we propose and demonstrate a novel transport-layer protocol for explicit latency control called latency-controlled end-to-end aggregation protocol (LEAP). The LEAP splits a data flow with quality of service (QoS) constraints into multiple subflows that are delivered over multiple parallel links (e.g., Wi-Fi and LTE in a standard smartphone, WiGig, and 5G in the near future). The subflow data rates are set based on a novel proactive forecasting of the achievable channel capacity, subject to application-specific QoS constraints. Cross-path encoding and redundancy adaptation are then used to deliberately balance the trade-off between maximum throughput, required delay, and minimum reliability as function of application/user-specific input parameters. When compared to leading state-of-the-art transport protocols in live network experiments, LEAP exhibits a superior capacity to reliably provide a high and stable throughput with bounded latency, both in wired and wireless scenarios. The LEAP is also the first protocol to allow applications to explicitly set their priorities, giving them the freedom to set the operating point in the trade-off between throughput, latency, and reliability.

A survey on QoS mechanisms in WSN for computational intelligence based routing protocols

With the rapid development in ubiquitous smart sensors, wireless sensor networks have started to evolve into numerous applications including healthcare, medical, agriculture, transportation, industry, internet of things, and smart cities. However, satisfying Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the diverse application domains remains a challenging issue due to heterogeneous traffic flows, dynamic network conditions, and resource-constrained nature of sensor nodes. In this regard, application-specific QoS provisioning techniques have received considerable research attention at the network layer. This paper presents a systematic review on the QoS mechanisms that have been employed by routing protocols and also highlights the performance issues of each mechanism. Afterwards, the survey presents a comparative analysis of computational intelligence based QoS-aware routing protocols with their strengths and limitations. Finally, this survey discusses various potential directions for future research in the field of QoS provisioning at network layer.

A new clustering structure for VANET

The Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) paradigm offers the opportunity of extending Intelligent Transport System (ITS) by supporting its applications through vehicle-to-vehicle communications, notably in the areas where the infrastructure is inexistent, in failure, or overloaded. However, the complexity induced by ad hoc network management raises many challenges that have to be solved such as the sharing of bandwidth resources, the limitations on the duration of the connections between the vehicles, and the application-specific quality of service (QoS) requirements. Recently, the Chain-Branch-Leaf clustering scheme (CBL) has been proposed for vehicle-to-vehicle ad hoc routing that combines the information of road configuration, vehicle mobility, and link quality in order to build an efficient clustering connecting the entire VANET through a flexible backbone. This work presents a comparative study between the native Multipoint relaying clustering used in the Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and CBL scheme. The results show that CBL reduces significantly the routing traffic overhead compared to native OLSR, thus freeing up more bandwidth for ITS applications and reducing the IP delays for peer-to-peer applications.

Scalable classification of QoS for real-time interactive applications from IP traffic measurements

Measurement of network Quality of Service (QoS) has attracted considerable research effort over the last two decades. The recent trend towards Internet Service Providers (ISP's) offering application-specific QoS is creating possibilities for more sophisticated QoS metrics to be offered by ISP's in service level agreements. This in turn could be used for the purposes of improved network optimization and billing according to application specific QoS guarantees. We report a scalable near real-time approach using passively logged IP traffic data for classification of application latency and packet loss across a range of real-time interactive applications. We run six experiments involving Minecraft, Quake 3 Urban Terror, VLC video streaming and the commercial Wirofon VOIP application. We use a mixture of laboratory and real-world deployments, with run times ranging from hours to days, and observe a combination of real and simulated ISP latency and packet loss events. Our binary classification (i.e. classes 'OK' or 'lag') 10-fold cross validation F1 scores are between 0.80 and 0.93 depending on the application type. Our multi-class classification (i.e. classes representing discrete packet loss or latency ranges) 10-fold cross validation F1 scores for Minecraft are 0.89 for latency and 0.90 for packet loss. With new business models between ISP's and application developers being actively considered this work represents a significant contribution to the debate by providing scientific evidence relating to a novel approach to scalable QoS measurement

Routing in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks: A Survey of Existing Protocols and Open Research Issues

With the advancement of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and technology, applicability of WSNs as a system is touching new heights. The development of multimedia nodes has led to the creation of another intelligent distributed system, which can transfer real-time multimedia traffic, ubiquitously. Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are applicable in a wide range of areas including area monitoring and video surveillance. But due to unreliable error-prone communication medium and application specific quality of service (QoS) requirements, routing of real-time multimedia traffic in WMSNs poses a serious problem. The paper discusses various existing routing strategies in WMSNs, with their properties and limitations which lead to open research issues. Further, detailed classification and analytical comparison of discussed protocols are also presented.

A General QoS Aware Flow-Balancing and Resource Management Scheme in Distributed Software-Defined Networks

Due to the limited service capabilities of centralized controllers, it is difficult to process high volume of flows within reasonable time. This particularly degrades the strict quality of service (QoS) requirements of interactive media applications, which is non-negligible factor. To alleviate this concern, distributed deployments of software-defined network (SDN) controllers are inevitable and have gained a predominant position. However, to maintain application specific QoS requirements, the number of resources used in network directly impacts the capital and operational expenditure. Hence, in distributed SDN architectures, issues such as flow arrival rate, resources required and operational cost have significant mutual dependencies on each other. Therefore, it is essential to research feasible methods to maintain QoS and minimize resources provisioning cost. Motivated from this, we propose a solution in a distributed SDN architectures that provides flow-balancing (with guaranteed QoS) in pro-active operations of SDN controllers, and attempts to optimize the use of instance resources provisioning costs. We validate our solution using the tools of queuing theory. Our studies indicate that with our solution, a network with minimum resources and affordable cost with guaranteed application QoS can be set-up.

A Survey on Energy-Efficient Routing Techniques with QoS Assurances for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

The recent technological advances in micro electro-mechanical systems have promoted the development of a powerful class of sensor-based distributed intelligent systems capable of ubiquitously retrieving multimedia information, namely Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). WMSNs are gaining more popularity day by day as they are envisioned to support a large number of both non-real time and real-time multimedia applications. However, satisfying the stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements of multimedia transmission in a resource-constrained sensor network environment places new challenges to routing. As an outcome, optimal energy and application-specific QoS aware routing for WMSNs has gained considerable research attention recently. In this paper, current state-of-the-art in energy-efficient routing techniques for WMSNs is surveyed together with the highlights of the performance issues of each strategy. We outline the design challenges of routing protocols for WMSNs followed by the limitations of current techniques designed for non-multimedia data transmission. Further, a classification of recent routing protocols for WMSNs and a discussion of possible future research trends are presented.

A Novel MAC Protocol with Different QoS for WMSNs Materials

The adoption of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) by applications that require complex operations, ranging from health care to industrial monitoring, has brought forward a new challenge of fulfilling the quality of service (QoS) requirements of these applications. Since the requirements depend on the applications, it would be difficult to design a single MAC that satisfies the wide range of applications. This calls for a suitable MAC protocol capable of achieving application-specific QoS. In this paper, we have proposed a novel MAC protocol with different QoS for WMSNs, which not only adapts to application oriented QoS, but also attempts to conserve energy without violating QoS-constraints. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of providing a bound latency including real-time and better throughput, at the cost of reasonable energy consumption, in comparison to other existing MAC protocols.

Power Aware Ad Hoc On-demand Distance Vector (PAAODV) Routing for MANETS

Efficient implementation of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) needs a set of application specific Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as bandwidth, delay and power etc. be guaranteed on a regular basis for the entire life time of operation of the ad hoc network. To achieve this, required measures should be taken at the level of the corresponding ad hoc routing protocol. Most of the routing protocols, especially on-demand routing protocols like Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad hoc Ondemand Distance Vector (AODV), mostly concentrate on determining a route with minimum number of hops, where the issues like delay and power management remain unresolved. In this paper, we suggest Power Aware AODV (PAAODV) protocol for ad hoc networks, which is an enhancement of existing AODV ad hoc routing protocol. The principal goal behind devising PAAODV is to optimally reduce power consumption to a possible minimum level in an ad hoc network with the connectivity of the network not being disrupted. As a consequence of it, the overall power consumed in transmission of overhead packets is significantly reduced. On the other hand, more power can be utilized for transmission of the data packets. In this research work, existing on-demand routing protocol, namely AODV, is enhanced to PAAODV and its performance is verified through simulations using network simulator NS-2. Simulation results justify that power consumed in transmission of data packets using PAAODV is reduced by 25% as compared to that in AODV, and the performance of the ad hoc network is improved as a whole.

Dynamic duty cycle and adaptive contention window based QoS-MAC protocol for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Rapid penetration of small, customized wireless devices and enormous growth of wireless communication technologies has already set the stage for large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks. While the need to minimize the energy consumption has driven significant researches in wireless sensor networks, offering some precise quality of service (QoS) for multimedia transmission over sensor networks has not received significant attention. However, the emerging new applications like video surveillance, telemedicine and traffic monitoring needs transmission of wireless multimedia over sensor networks. Naturally, offering some better QoS for wireless multimedia over sensor networks raises significant challenges. The network needs to cope up with battery-constraints, while providing improved QoS (end-to-end delay and bandwidth requirement). This calls for a suitable sensory MAC protocol capable of achieving application-specific QoS. In this paper, we have proposed a new QoS-based sensory MAC protocol, which not only adapts to application-oriented QoS, but also attempts to conserve energy without violating QoS-constraints. Performance modeling, analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of providing lower delay and better throughput, at the cost of reasonable energy consumption, in comparison to other existing sensory MAC protocols.

An XML-based Quality of Service Enabling Language for the Web

In this paper, we introduce an XML-based hierarchical QoS markup language, called HQML, to enhance distributed multimedia applications on the World Wide Web (WWW) with quality of service (QoS) capability. The design ofHQML is based on two observations: (1) the absence of a systematic QoS specification language, that can be used by distributed multimedia applications on the WWW to utilize the state-of-the-art QoS management technology and (2) the power and popularity of XML to deliver richly structured contents over the Web. HQML allows distributed multimedia applications to specify all kinds of application-specific QoS policies and requirements. During runtime, the HQML Executor translates the HQML file into desired data structures and cooperates with the QoS proxies that assist applications in end-to-end QoS negotiation, setup and enforcement. In order to make QoS services tailored toward user preferences and meet the challenges of uncertainty in the distributed heterogeneous environments, the design of HQML is featured as interactive andflexible . In order to allow application developers to create HQML specifications correctly and easily, we have designed and developed a unified visual QoS programming environment, called QoSTalk. In QoSTalk, we adopt a grammatical approach to perform consistency check on the visual QoS specifications and generate HQML files automatically. Finally, we introduce the distributed QoS compiler, which performs the automatic mappings between application- and resource-level QoS parameters to relieve the application developer of the burden of dealing with low-level QoS specifications.