Analysis of Resource Reservation Aggregation in On-Board Networks

The concept of providing mobile Internet connectivity for passengers in public transport vehicles, where users connect to a local network that attaches to the Internet via a mobile router and a wireless link, has become increasingly popular in recent years, as evidenced by the growing amount of commercially available systems and associated research and standardization activities. The challenge of providing wireless connectivity to networks in motion is compounded by the highly dynamic nature of the user population and the strict quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of many applications typical of such environments. As a result, several protocols extending Internet QoS support approaches to on-board mobile networks have been proposed in the past. In this paper, we focus on modeling and performance evaluation of periodical aggregation of resource reservation messages, which forms the basis of the on-board RSVP protocol. We present a model consisting of a discrete-time, multiple-server and finite-capacity queueing system with bulk arrivals and departures, conduct a detailed analysis of the model, and use it to evaluate the performance of the resource reservation aggregation scheme in a practical scenario. The validity of our model is also backed by extensive simulation results.