A fair resource allocation protocol for multimedia wireless networks

Wireless networks are expected to support real-time interactive multimedia traffic and must be able, therefore, to provide their users with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. Although the QoS provisioning problem arises in wireline networks as well, mobility of hosts and scarcity of bandwidth makes QoS provisioning a challenging task in wireless networks. It has been noticed that multimedia applications can tolerate and gracefully adapt to transient fluctuations in the QoS that they receive from the network. The additional flexibility afforded by the ability of multimedia applications to tolerate and adapt to transient changes in QoS can be exploited by protocol designers to significantly improve the overall performance of wireless systems. This paper presents a fair resource allocation protocol for multimedia wireless networks that uses a combination of bandwidth reservation and bandwidth borrowing to provide network users with QoS in terms of guaranteed bandwidth, call blocking, and call dropping probabilities. Our view of fairness was inspired by the well-known max-min fairness allocation protocol for wireline networks. Simulation results are presented that compare our protocol to similar schemes.