Service differentiation in broadband wireless access networks with scheduling and connection admission control: a unified analysis

VVe present a unified analytical model for service differentiation in a broadband packet-switched wireless network (e.g., IEEE 802.16) with two types of traffic, namely, the quality-of-service (QoS)-sensitive traffic and the best-effort traffic. While fair scheduling is used to allocate radio resources between these two traffic types, connection admission control (CAC) is employed to limit the number of ongoing connections for QoS-sensitive users so that the performance requirements for the QoS-sensitive traffic can be satisfied. An analytical model is developed assuming a work conserving traffic scheduling in the radio link layer and it also considers multi-rate transmission at the physical layer. Both the packet-level and the connection-level performance measures are obtained. Finally, we apply the concept of utility to obtain user satisfaction as a function of the QoS measures obtained from the analytical model. An optimization formulation is also presented from which the near-optimal solutions for scheduling and CAC parameters can be obtained. The proposed analytical model would be useful for performance analysis and engineering of next-generation broadband wireless networks