A QoS enabling queuing scheme for 4G wireless access networks

Abstract

There will be heterogeneous wireless access networks in 4G systems, e.g., WLAN, UTRAN etc. The networks will need to support QoS and full mobility. For each connection request by a mobile user in such networks, there will be need for a scheme for selecting the best network from among the available networks. This paper proposes a scheme that enhances existing approaches to addressing this challenge. The scheme models the radio access network as a network of queuing nodes. With this model, and for each available path, we determine the statistical QoS parameters of the user traffic in the radio channel. We postulate that the statistics indicate the QoS capabilities of the network and can therefore be used to select the best network to serve the mobile user.