Weighted fair queueing and compensation techniques for wireless packet switched networks

Recently there has been a tremendous growth in the popularity of wireless packet switched networks. In addition to the traditional voice services, wireless service providers and equipment manufacturers are working hard on offering higher speed data access over cellular wireless networks. One of the key challenges of the next generation wireless networks (such as EGPRS) is the ability to provide different grade of QoS (quality of service) services to the users. In the wireline networks, the QoS mechanisms have been extensively studied and researchers have agreed that weighted fair queueing (WFQ) is a popular scheduling algorithm to guarantee bounded delay, bounded throughput and fairness. However, adapting the WFQ scheduler to wireless networks is not trivial due to the location and weather dependent data rates. In this paper we propose optimal schemes that are based on combining WFQ with compensation techniques which swap channel access among traffic flows that experience variable data rates, so that the variable data rates are transparent to the users.