A bandwidth aggregation-aware QoS negotiation mechanism for next-generation wireless networks

The transmission of high quality video requires high bandwidth. Ensuring constantly high bandwidth in wireless environments is a challenging task given constraints in the current wireless network resources. Current mobile computers are equipped with multiples wireless interfaces that can be used to improve the video quality by aggregating the bandwidth of these interfaces. Such Bandwidth Aggregation (BAG) approach involves multiple paths in communication and gives rise to a number of issues related to the management of the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and packet reordering. To guarantee an efficient and fair management of SLA, this paper presents a bandwidth aggregation-aware QoS negotiation mechanism that enables users to dynamically negotiate their desired service levels and to reach them through the use of bandwidth aggregation. This operation is performed while ensuring a fair use of the network resources among all competing users. To cope with packet reordering, a new scheduling strategy is presented. The performance evaluation of the proposed bandwidth aggregation-aware QoS negotiation scheme and the proposed scheduling algorithm are conducted via simulations and the results are discussed.