A new resource distribution model for improved QoS in an integrated WiMAX/WiFi architecture

Wireless access technology has come a long way in its relatively short but remarkable lifetime, which has so far been led by the WiFi technology. While WiFi enjoys a high penetration in the market, its hotspots are connected to the internet through wired connections, making its deployment cost very high. WiMAX has emerged as an existing new wireless technology, which provides larger coverage and higher bandwidth. Deployment of WiMAX only infrastructure, however, is highly expensive, which has motivated researchers to search for a low cost integrated WiMAX/WiFi architecture (using WiMAX as the backhaul and WiFi as the last mile technology) that supports 4G applications and provides high speed broadband services. WiMAX technology is equipped with mechanisms capable of delivering guaranteed quality of service (QoS). WiFi, on the other hand, has very limited capacity for providing QoS to the end applications. Delivering improved QoS in an integrated WiMAX/WiFi architecture poses a serious technological challenge. In this paper, we depict a converged architecture of WiMAX and WiFi, and then propose an adaptive resource distribution model for the access points. The new model is designed as an optimization problem that maximizes the QoS utility of the network. A new QoS utility function is proposed that takes the connection priority and continuity into account. Our simulation results show that our proposed scheme maintains QoS in different scenarios whereas existing other resource sharing schemes experience violation of QoS (minimum rate requirement) in 66% cases.