A system scenario for wireless broadband access with multimedia support

The upcoming teleservices in mobile networks require quality of service (QoS) support, which have to be considered during the radio access network (RAN) planning. QoS becomes one of the most important points for the network planning process. Mobile network providers that want to offer information services based on QoS, have to plan their networks and their network capacity according to user demands. Traditional RAN planning tools consider only best effort service for all applications since RANs were not able to guarantee QoS before release 99 of 3GPP specifications. This has consequences in network planning and user satisfaction; therefore it is necessary to take the QoS requirements of each application of every user into account during the planning process. This paper presents an analysis of the available 3GPP QoS mechanisms in the different releases in order to include factors in RAN planning for QoS support. Finally, the differences in the RAN dimensioning between best effort and QoS support are exemplified.

Commoditization and virtualization of wireless networks are changing the economics of mobile networks to help network providers, e.g. Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), move from proprietary and bespoke hardware and software platforms to an open, cost-efficient and flexible cellular ecosystem. In addition, rich and innovation local services can be efficiently materialized through cloudification by leveraging the existing infrastructure. The future communication architecture for mobile cloud services - Mobile Cloud Networking (MCN) is a EU FP7 large-scale integrating project (IP) funded by the European Commission that is focusing on how cloud computing and network function virtualization concepts are applied to achieve virtualization of cellular networks. It aims at the development of a fully cloud-based mobile communication and application platform, or more specifically, it aims to investigate, implement and evaluate the technological foundations for the mobile communication system of long-term evolution (LTE), based on mobile network with decentralized computing and smart storage offered as one atomic service: on-demand, elastic and pay-as-you-go. MCN will investigate, implement and evaluate the technological foundations for that system to meet real-time performance and support efficient and elastic use and sharing of radio access and mobile core network resources between operators. Mobile network functionalities-such as baseband unit processing, mobility management and quality of service (QoS) control-will run on the enhanced mobile cloud platform leveraging commodity hardware, which requires extensions toward higher decentralization and enhancing them to elastically scale up and down based on load. The end-to-end control and management orchestrates infrastructure and services across several technological domains: wireless, mobile core and data centres, providing guaranteed multiple end-to-end service, mobility through the Follow-Me Cloud concept. In this chapter, we present three enabling components of such a future MCN architecture: Radio Access Network as a Service (RANaaS), Information-Centric Networking as a Service (ICNaaS) and Mobility Prediction as a Service (MOBaaS).

To meet the growing demand for broadband wireless connectivity, integrating 3G and IEEE 802.16 networks is a clear and viable solution. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first solution proposed for the integration of 3G and 802.16 wireless networks. We present a novel network and mobile client architecture that provides seamless roaming and mobility while maintaining connectivity across these heterogeneous wireless networks and provides quality of service (QoS) support. To provide QoS support to the application in the integrated network environment, the proposed architecture incorporates the procedures for activating a QoS session, the translation between network-specific QoS classifications, and network and session layer QoS support. We provide simulation results that show the viability and performance of the proposed QoS architecture

New generation of mobile communication systems will focus on seamlessly integrating existing wireless technologies including 3G cellular systems, wireless LAN and Bluetooth to create a wide coverage, improved capacity and enhanced QoS heterogeneous wireless communication system. It is envisaged that the next generation of wireless communication systems will support comprehensive and personalized services, providing stable system performance and quality of service. In this paper we investigate and analyse the performance of a wireless communication system which consists of an integrated cellular communication system and a wireless LAN radio access networks inorder to determine an optimum combination of radio access technologies in a coverage area for efficient handling of mixed traffic requests from mobile users.

The paper studies fair scheduling with quality of service (QoS) support in ad hoc networks. The goal is to satisfy the minimum bandwidth requirements of guaranteed flows and to provide a fair share of residual bandwidth among all flows. We propose a new cluster-based mechanism called two-tier slot allocation protocol (2TSAP), which improves system throughput and ensures per-cluster fairness while satisfying the requirements of guaranteed flows. With 2TSAP, the network is logically partitioned into clusters, each with a scheduler. The scheduler assigns time slots to mobiles in the affiliated clusters based on the first tier algorithm. The mobiles scheduled to send at the next time slot then in turn assign the time slot to flows determined by the second tier algorithm. We compare the performance of 2TSAP with Q EMLM-FQ, a virtual-time based fair scheduling mechanism with QoS support. The simulation results show that 2TSAP meets the minimum requirements of guaranteed flows, shares the residual bandwidth fairly among all flows, and improves overall system throughput.

The rapid evolution of Grid Computing and the development of new middleware services make Grid platforms increasingly used not only for best effort scientific jobs but also in industrial and business applications. This has taken to the growing demand of Quality of Service (QoS) support. However, the QoS issue on Grid is quite difficult, as Grid has been originally designed without any QoS support, and it is a complex system. During the previous years some solutions have been proposed to supply QoS for specific classes of applications. This results in a focused and a heterogeneous approach, so that it is hard to evaluate its sufficiency and its robustness with respect to the large spectrum of possible Grid applications. In this context, our contribution concerns three points: first, we analyze the current approach to QoS on Grid as a relationship among QoS features, applications, and architectures; second, we evaluate the QoS requirements of two recent QoS‐demanding applications on Grid, namely Massive Multiplayer Online Games and Urgent Computing, comparing these requirements with the support provided by current QoS architectures; and third, we propose an alternative approach to QoS provision on Grid based on the definition of a dedicated QoS‐management layer to overcome the limitations of the current methodologies. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Energy saving and quality of service (QoS) support are two important issues of Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) wireless networks. Unfortunately, achieving high energy saving efficiency often implies degradation of QoS support. In this paper, we address the issue of QoS support under Discontinuous Reception (DRX), the power saving mechanism of LTE-A. Different from previous studies which analyzed average packet delay under DRX mechanism, we adopt packet loss ratio due to violation of delay bound as QoS requirements of real-time applications. The problem of QoS support under DRX mechanism is defined as an optimization problem to maximize average power saving under the constraint that the packet loss ratio is no greater than a pre-determined threshold. We derive packet loss ratio and energy saving efficiency given DRX parameter values and propose an approach to select appropriate DRX parameter values. Simulations are conducted to verify our analysis. We found that the analytical results match well with simulations. Moreover, the energy saving efficiency achieved by the selected DRX parameter values is very close to that of the optimum solution.

In this letter, we address the problem of resource allocation with efficiency and quality of service (QoS) support in uplink for a wireless CDMA network supporting real-time (RT) and non-realtime (NRT) communication services. For RT and NRT users, there are different QoS requirements. We introduce and describe a new scheme, namely, traffic aided uplink opportunistic scheduling (TAUOS). While guaranteeing the different QoS requirements, TAUOS exploits the channel condition to improve system throughput. In TAUOS, the cross-layer information, file size information, is used to improve fairness for NRT users. Extensive simulation results show that our scheme can achieve high system throughput in uplink wireless CDMA systems, while guaranteeing QoS requirements.

This research aimed to measure the level of quality of academic advising and student support services from the perspective of students of Preparatory Year at the University of Najran. To achieve this, the descriptive analytical method was followed by administering a questionnaire consisting of (37 items) which were distributed over four dimensions (the academic advisor – the quality of the academic support for outstanding and struggling students – the quality of supporting talented and creative students – the quality of complaints and suggestions services). The sample consisted of (300) students selected from among the preparatory year at the University of Najran. The results indicated that the level of quality of academic advising services and student support services was (medium level) with a mean of (2.24). There were statistically significant differences at (α = 0.05) in the level of quality of academic services and student support services according to the level (first-second) in favor of the second level. There were also differences in the level of academic advising and student support services according to student status at (α = 0.05) in favor of struggling students. Results also indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in the students' assessment of the quality of services due to the gender variable. The study concluded that academic advising services need more efforts to improve the quality of services, especially in providing the necessary support to students, as well as the services for gifted and creative students, complaints and suggestions services. The study recommended the need to adopt clear mechanisms for academic advising and student support through which these services can be provided to all student categories and to evaluate the quality of these services.
 Keywords: academic advising, preparatory year, quality, Najran University.

Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques used in Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) can provide for many of the services and features promised by 4G wireless networks, such as supporting multimedia services with high data rates, and wide coverage area, as well as all-IP with Quality of Service (QoS) support and security. In this paper we propose a new scheduling scheme and admission control policy for WiMAX that efficiently enhances performance and utilizes resources, while being fair, practical and in compliance with the IEEE 802.16 specifications. Our scheduler is dynamic and based on hierarchical and ad-hoc models. Our solution provides QoS support to all traffic classes defined by the standard, and it dynamically changes the bandwidth allocation depending on the traffic characteristics and service demands. Simulation results show that the proposed solution can deliver QoS support and be fair to all classes of service in a WiMAX network.

In this paper we introduce a novel MAC protocol that provides Quality of Service (QoS) support for multimedia traffic in UWB-based wireless local area networks. The proposed protocol allocates transmission opportunities to QoS and best effort traffic using a set of scheduling and resource control algorithms. The algorithms account for the UWB characteristics such as the co-existence of multiple simultaneous transmissions as well as the possibility of dynamically assigning the nodes' transmission rate and power. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol can provide QoS support while optimizing resource utilization.

The evolution of wireless sensor technology allows for the provision of enhanced services to miscellaneous application domains. In parallel, Quality of Service (QoS) support becomes necessary to satisfy the needs of these new service models. This paper presents QoS requirements from a service model perspective and describes challenges for QoS support in WSNs. We also provide a review of current efforts in Medium Access Control (MAC) QoS support in WSNs. Then, we investigate various performance metrics of IEEE 802.15.4 standard in order to determine the technological issues that arise. From the outcome of the experiments conducted, using ns-2, we identified that different schemes of services and application scenarios for different ways of deployment, scales of network and traffic load can satisfy diverse user needs and requirements.

WiMAX femtocell architecture has gained a lot of attention because of its better indoor service provision through traffic sharing between WiMAX and femtocell. However, since the signal of a WiMAX base station (BS) is usually stronger than that of a femtocell base station (fBS), the handover procedure of mobile stations may not be triggered due to the stronger signal association. And, a huge number of fBSs deployed within a WiMAX BS coverage area will require extra power to scan all fBSs for a handover determination. In this article, we propose a beacon-based handover scanning mechanism with Quality of Service (QoS) support. Through the modified beacons and MOB_NBR-ADV messages, a neighbor cell list with QoS parameters is generated automatically at each mobile station. The decision criteria for handover triggering and an appropriate target cell selection are also presented. The QualNet simulation results demonstrate that along with increased fBSs, the proposed mechanism can improve the total system throughput from 37% to 51% and obtain higher bandwidth utilization in the case of increasing number of fBSs, as compared with Full Scan and Neighbor Cell Information Mechanisms.

In this paper, we propose a modification of the observe extension of CoAP to include Quality of Service (QoS) support for timeliness. The proposed QoS support is based on delivery priority. Nodes are able to express the priority order with which they wish to be notified. Furthermore, they are also able to specify which notification they want to receive. We classify the notifications in two categories: Critical and Non-Critical. The provided QoS is the result of a negotiation between the client and server. The client demands a certain degree of QoS according to its role. The server could accept or negotiate it. This choice depends on the availability of server and network resources. We evaluate our proposal in a real Wireless Sensor Network. An e-health application has been chosen as target of our tests. The performance evaluation is done in terms of average delay, energy consumption and delivery ratio.

Objective. To evaluate academic satisfaction with the virtual modality implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic, as perceived by students of the Nursing Program at the Universidad de Huánuco (Peru) in 2021. The study aimed to identify areas of satisfaction and aspects for improvement, particularly in technological accessibility and the quality of support services. Methods. This was a quantitative study with a simple descriptive, cross-sectional design. The population consisted of 713 students, with a probabilistic sample of 250. A validated academic satisfaction scale and an online survey technique were used for data collection, followed by descriptive statistical analysis. Results. A total of 89.2% of students reported satisfaction with the virtual modality. Among the dimensions evaluated, technological acceptance achieved 86.1% satisfaction, and personal achievements reached 87.6%. Additionally, 70.9% positively evaluated university support services. However, 10.8% of students expressed dissatisfaction, primarily due to connectivity issues and the quality of certain support services, which negatively impacted their academic experience. Conclusion. Most students perceived high satisfaction with virtual learning, highlighting the accessibility and usefulness of technological tools. Areas of dissatisfaction underscore the need to improve connectivity and some support services, which are essential to optimizing virtual education in the university context.