Computer Communications 29 (2006) 671682 www.elsevier.

com/locate/comcom

End-to-end QoS support for IP and multimedia trafc in heterogeneous mobile networks
Abbas Jamalipoura,*, Pascal Lorenzb
a

School of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Sydney, Building J03, Sydney NSW 2006, Australia b University of Haute-Alsace, France

Abstract Quality of service support in future mobile multimedia systems is one of the most signicant challenging issues facing researchers in the eld of telecommunications. Inclusion of IP and other multimedia trafc in the 3G and beyond mobile networks requires a closer look at this issue ever than before on an end-to-end basis, necessarily with appropriate harmonization consideration among heterogeneous networks of wired and wireless. In this paper, quality of service is revisited taking into consideration the above requirements and numerical examples are provided to illustrate how simple parameters in the network can make the quality of service support in heterogeneous networks very difcult. A review of advanced technologies for providing future wireless Internet will be also provided. q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Quality of service; Next generation wireless networks; 3G networks; Internet and multimedia trafc; Wireless IP; Transmission Control Protocol (TCP); Delay performance analysis

1. Introduction The number and variety of services of the secondgeneration wireless cellular (2G) systems have increased signicantly in the past few years and this will continue to grow even further in the emerging third-generation (3G) and beyond (B3G) systems. Cellular services started with the basic voice communications and then several new dataoriented applications such as short-message service (SMS), electronic mail, WAP (wireless application protocol) for the web micro-browsing, and multimedia message service (MMS) have been gradually included. Design of advanced access technologies and core network architectures in 3G systems such as the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and cdma2000 have resulted in higher data rates and more efcient spectrum utilization. This in consequence has made it possible that more bandwidthdemanding applications such as video conferencing and broadband Internet access will become available on a commercial basis to mobile users [1].
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C61 2 9351 2843; fax: C61 2 9351 3847. E-mail address: a.jamalipour@ieee.org (A. Jamalipour).

0140-3664/$ - see front matter q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2005.07.021

Introduction of new services into cellular networks has a two-fold characteristic. On one hand, in order to implement those services over the bandwidth-limited wireless channel, new access technologies and core network management techniques are required. Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) for example has provided a better modulation to the 2G systems so that high data rates in order of 144, 384 Kbps, and up to 2 Mbps became feasible [1]. On the other hand, having new services in cellular networks logically means more interactions and interconnections among different telecommunications networks. In the rst stages of the 2G implementations the main interconnection was with the public switching telephony network (PSTN). As shown in Fig. 1, in a 2G system mobile station (MSs) are connected to the PSTN mainly through two mobile entities: the base station subsystem (BSS) and the mobile switching center (MSC). Therefore, the simplied architecture of a 2G mobile system would mainly focus on support of air interface between the MS and the xed telephony network. Inclusion of more data-centric services in new mobile networks and the requirement of better support of those services need for more and better network interconnection options in compare with the 2G cellular systems. As a result, the enhanced 2G networks and their successor 3G systems look at architectures similar to the one shown in Fig. 2. In this conguration, the mobile system is connected not only

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MSC: Mobile Switching Center BSS: Base Station Subsystem PSTN: Public Switching Telephony Network ISDN: Integrated Service Digital Network

PSTN / ISDN

MSC MSC

MSC MS C

BSS BS S

BSS BS S

BSS BS S

BSS BS S

Fig. 1. Basic architecture of the second-generation cellular mobile systems.

to the circuit-switched telephony network for the purpose of voice communications but also to the data networks and especially to the global Internet for supporting web services. Increase in more network interconnections and multimedia services has resulted in new challenges for cellular networks. In traditional cellular networks the main task was to make voice communications between a mobile station and a second party; another mobile station or a xed telephone. In such a case, the problem was how to locate the geographic location of the mobile station when it makes or receives a call and then what will happen if the mobile station moves from the service area of one base station to another one while a call is in place. This latter issue is called handoff management and together with the former issue,

namely the location management the mobility management problem is dened for cellular systems. Consequently, the quality of service (QoS) in original cellular networks was simplied by having a good mobility management control. Call dropping probability and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are therefore the main QoS metrics in such a network. When the number of mobile users is too high, then we need also to consider trafc management techniques in order to satisfy some other QoS metrics such as new call blocking probability and handoff call blocking probability when a user initiates a new call or when he moves from one cell to another cell during handoff, respectively. With multimedia services and more network interconnections, support of QoS in cellular networks would not be

Fig. 2. Enhanced architecture of the modern cellular systems.

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straightforward anymore. Firstly, the multimedia services have diverse QoS requirements and supporting all those requirements to all services would be neither feasible nor essential at all times [2]. Some sorts of QoS management are thus necessary to achieve an acceptable level of service quality in future cellular networks. Secondly, because of the interconnection of heterogeneous networks in the system each with its own limitations, characteristics, and QoS handling techniques, achieving an end-to-end QoS is a real challenge. Without an end-to-end support of QoS in the system the issue will be unresolved. In this paper, some challenging issues for the QoS support in wireless cellular systems will be addressed. We begin with a review of wireless Internet technology, and then in Section 3, QoS establishment in telecommunications networks will be revisited. This section describes requirements of an end-to-end QoS in heterogeneous networks and how this important issue needs to be considered in future mobile multimedia communication systems. After that, different approaches for cellular systems and the Internet QoS will be examined. The end-to-end QoS support in heterogeneous mobile networks with IP and multimedia trafc requires efcient collaborations among several networks involved in the end-to-end communications path. This issue has become a major topic in QoS guarantee in recent research (see e.g. [3]). In order to provide a practical example to clarify the issue, we will then present some specic numerical results on performance of the transmission control protocol (TCP), as the dominant transport layer protocol in wireless and cellular IP networks. This discussion looks at a new dimension to the TCP performance over cellular network compared with previous papers in the eld.

Mobile and wireless Internet, as its name species, should provide a seamless transition from a geographically xed domain into a mobile environment. By seamless transition, we mean that there should be no sensible change for a user who is connected to the Internet while moving from a xed domain into a mobile domain. In a broad sense, this could be even the case when a user moves from a wireless network domain to another wireless domain. In technical term, the Internet access for the user should be independent of the access technology used for the Internet services. 2.1. Change in network protocols stack During transition from the traditional wired Internet to the wireless Internet, network protocols and network architecture will be changed dramatically. In a mobile Internet system, the user should not feel a dramatic change in quality of service (QoS) for the application currently being used. The most humanly sensible quality measure is the connection speed or data bit rate, which is logically, followed the delay requirements. Change in protocols goes into all layers of the network protocol stack. Link layer (Layer 2) has to be modied in order to concurrently establish two or more connections via different access networks supported by the physical layer (Layer 1). This change in the link layer protocol has to be incorporated with the computer operating system (OS) so that, for example, two Internet connections can be set up and maintained at the same time. At the physical layer, mobile devices have to be equipped with multiple interfaces to different access networks (wired such as Ethernet cable and dial-up modem as well as wireless such as Wireless LAN (local area network), infrared, and cellular modems). The physical layer has to include several interfaces to Layer 2 in order to manage the best connection to higher layers, and if one connection cannot provide the required quality to the application, a combination of two access networks can be granted. At the network layer (Layer 3), Internet protocol (IP) needs major changes so that it can handle the routing and other tasks of the network layer in wired and wireless environments. Mobility of the IP address should be accommodated into the future mobile Internet. Signaling requirement of the IP layer protocol has to be simplied to provide more spectrum efciency in future wireless access network. IP addressing and global address translation between heterogeneous networks must be performed in protocol change at Layer 3. The transport layer on top of the IP layer may be considered as the main part of modication for future mobile Internet networks. The legacy design of this layer for wired networks avoids efcient use of the radio channel capacity and thus major modication and extensions are required at the transport layer with dominant TCP and UDP (user datagram protocol).

2. The wireless Internet The wireless mobile Internet, which was a dream just a few years ago, is now progressing so fast that it would revolutionize the whole framework of the telecommunication industry. The wireless mobile Internet is not just an extension of Internet into the mobile environment giving users access to the Internet services while they are on the move. It is about integrating the Internet and telecommunications technologies into a single system that covers all communications needs of human beings. With the extensive progress achieved during the last decade in wireless access technology, switching and routing in the Internet, and sophisticated hardware and software design, such a comprehensive Internet technology would no longer be a dream but a practical reality. Whilst the rst cellular-based mobile Internet services were provided users with avors of an actual wireless mobile Internet system, there is still a need to research more to achieve the systematic goals of this network [1].

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In a mobile Internet, the mobile user does not see any difference between the currently available service providers at a given time and location, and it is assumed that a user may access to the Internet regardless of his point of attachment to the network and the supporting access and core networks. Therefore, a system for authentication and authorization of users when moving across different networks must be established. Authentication provides the proof of identity of a user to the network that the user is going to access. This process is usually performed through an authentication function procedure. Authorization certies that what type of services may be provided to an authenticated user. Therefore, it is not sufcient that a user is in a capacity to connect to a network but the user has to be subscribed for a list of services that he is going to receive from the connecting network. Accounting as the third A in the network AAA (authentication, authorization, and accounting), provides a history of what and when a user used a particular service while connected to a network. Mobile Internet is going to stay among different telecommunication technologies and hence needs to share the limited resources. A sophisticated resource management thus would be vitally necessary to share those resources among all coexisting technologies. Resource management schemes such as bandwidth managements, admission control, and congestion control, and so on will guarantee reliable performance of the network as well as a fair allocation of resources to all eligible users. 2.2. Next generation network and the mobile Internet The current network architectures used in either the wired Internet or the cellular networks would not be appropriate and efcient for future wireless mobile Internet, even if we assume that the cellular networks will provide the major infrastructure of the mobile Internet. In recent years, many literature have discussed this issue and how it is possible to change the network architecture to be utilized for mobile Internet [410]. One major issue is making the core network independent of the underlying access technology. The emergence of several access technologies has resulted in a multitude of heterogeneous systems targeting different service types, data rates, and users. While the migration from rst to second generation cellular system involved transition from analog to digital technology; the evolution from second to third generation cellular system is driven by the popularity of the Internet and the need for higher data transmission availability on the move. The different available access technologies such as second generation GSM (Global System for Mobile communications) and IS-95 (cdmaOne), the enhanced higher data rate 3G packet switched UMTS and cdma2000, the high capacity/high bandwidth WLANs (IEEE 802.11, HIPERLAN, HIPERLAN2), high speed digital broadcast system such as Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB), Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) etc. with their own distinct characteristics,

complement each other. However, the absence of a single architecture to integrate all existing and future systems prevents the subscribers from enjoying reliable and global end-to-end connectivity through a single subscription. The main motivation for the research in next generation network architecture is based on factors such as: Demand for better availability of services and applications Global connectivity for any-type services at anytime, anywhere and anyhow Rapid increase in the number of wireless subscribers who want to make use of the same handheld terminal while roaming Support for bandwidth intensive applications such as real-time multimedia, online games and videoconferencing as well as traditional voice service (VoIP) The scalable and distributed next generation (or 4G) network architecture is expected to offer any-type services over a diverse set of places such as indoor, outdoor, pedestrian, and vehicular. These services as stated earlier will be offered over a large range of overlapping access networks (e.g. WLAN, 2G, 3G, xDSL, DVB, DAB etc.) that offer different data rates, coverage, bandwidth, delay and loss, QoS requirements etc. [1114]. Fig. 3 shows a general view of such a next generation system with overlapping heterogeneous access networks. The key features visible to the user in such a network are: Mobile terminals will be able to auto-congure to the specic access technology at the location of the terminal. Subscribers will have access to the various services on offer and enjoy a wired LAN equivalent quality of service, cost and security, even while running real-time applications. Ubiquitous and seamless connectivity will be provided through effective mobility, resource and QoS management schemes. The investments made by the subscriber will be respected by limiting the changes required in the multi-access mobile terminal in terms of hardware or software. The key research objectives for such a harmonized heterogeneous 4G network architecture are: Integration of all existing and future communication access systems through a common IPv6 protocol gluing mechanism Development of a modular and scalable architecture with well-dened distributed network functionalities Development of effective mobility, resource and QoS management schemes to offer seamless connectivity and end-to-end QoS between peer end terminals Development of physical architecture of a QoS enabled mobile terminal capable of accessing the Internet

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Fig. 3. General view of the next generation system showing overlapping heterogeneous access networks.

and real-time services over a multitude of access technologies Offering similar services (subject to network capacity and service policy) in both home and visited network based on preferences and service agreement in the subscription

3. Dening QoS in mobile multimedia networks QoS is a terminology that has been around for quite some time and maybe it is one of the most common words that have been used by the people working in the eld of telecommunications in the past few years. This usage popularity however, could not provide a clear denition of this important term and in some situations it has even led misunderstandings. The quality of service can be dened as a set of specic requirements for a particular service provided by a network to the subscribed users. Those requirements are however usually described by using some quantitative gures. So instead of asking for a good network service, the user is asked to specically request for other sorts of measures such as connection speed or delay, which can be described by a numerical value for example 56 Kbps or 300 ms, respectively, for data rate and delay. Having a quality term such as good or bad described by a quantitative metric simplies the process of allocation of that quality to a particular service by the provider and also prevent any possible ambiguity during the user request and service fulllment process [1]. Dening the QoS can be further simplied by separating user-based, network-based and technology-based requirements of the QoS [2]. At the user level, the service requirements are mainly those that can be seen by a user. This means that many system-level QoS architectures are essentially transparent to the user or because they are not in

a direct relationship with the end-user service, the user ignores them. For example, if a user is using a cellular phone for his daily voice communications, the ultimate purpose and requirement from the service is to have a reliable phone conversation and a reasonably acceptable level of voice quality. If the user moves from the service area of one base station to another one, the cellular network needs to perform a complicated procedure of location updating and handoff between cells in order to maintain the continuity of the call and service. For the user all those procedures are transparent and they will be ignored unless a call drop or a sensible change in quality of communication happens during the handoff. Included in the user level QoS are criticality, cost, and security as the distinguishing metrics. Cost and security are self-explaining terms. Criticality for multimedia applications (e.g. video conferencing over cellular or IP networks) could include issues such as video rate, video smoothness, picture detail, picture color accuracy, audio quality, audio/video synchronization, and so on. Based on access technology and network architecture we may nd more indicative gures to illustrate the service quality provided to the users. Although the users can see many of these indicators, they are more or less related to the technology behind the service and thus, a user will nd limited exibility in changing the prole after subscription to the service. Bandwidth, timeliness, and reliability are types of requirements specied by the network. The speed at which the multimedia data are delivered to users, the delay in initiating a session and delivering data among users, and how often the transmitted data are corrupted during the transmission, are the short explanations of the above three service types, respectively. By having numerical QoS measures it is possible for a user to specify precisely that what his service expectations are from the attached network in terms of quality, and also for the network to advertise to its users that what type of services can be offered. Having all those indicators dened

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above as the QoS metrics for all users are neither feasible nor necessary. Based upon the user or the application requirements at a particular time, there will be only a subset of those QoS indicators that needs to be fullled by the network to a user. In addition, we need to note that it is difcult to provide a guideline that could cover the QoS in all situations. We can see an irregular relationship between the QoS indicators observed in different systems. In case of wireless cellular systems, we can add another QoS indicator namely the mobility range. Mobility range in our denition can have two different meanings. The rst one is the geographical area size in which a user can move around and still receive the service from the attached network using network handoff capabilities, which is a macro-mobility approach in dening the mobility range. This is not something independent of the users application or that can solely determine the service quality for a particular network. For example, if you need a wireless service within the borders of a room, then having 1 mile coverage would not be an advantage in choosing the system to be used. The coverage however would be very important for a cellular mobile network in which users want to move very widely. Mobility range can also be dened as the size of the area covered by a single base station or an access point, for example the size of a cell in a cellular mobile network. If we consider, as an example, the relationship between the mobility range (mainly dened as the former approach) and other important QoS metrics, such as bandwidth (as a network-related QoS requirement) and cost (as a user-based QoS requirement), we can see that in different mobile systems such relationship is inconsistent and irregular. A wireless LAN can provide short-range coverage to a few hundred meters at very high-data rates from 1 Mbps (for IEEE 802.11), 11 Mbps (for the popular IEEE 802.11b), to 54 Mbps (for the more recent IEEE 802.11a/g standards). In the cellular world, 2G/2.5G systems, such as GSM and its successor GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), and cdmaOne, as well as 3G systems such as UMTS and cdma2000 offer wide mobility range but at signicantly lower data rates than the wireless LAN ranging from a few tens of Kbps to a few hundreds of Kbps at relatively expensive costs. If we look at broadband satellite systems, the coverage is eventually increased to global but the data rate is limited to around 2 Mbps at even more expensive cost. This example illustrates the inconsistency among most of the QoS metrics when heterogeneous networks are involved in an end-to-end communication. Keeping in mind the above denition of the QoS, in Section 4 we will see how cellular systems (wireless) and IP packet data networks (wired) have approached the issue of the QoS. These are the components of the future heterogeneous mobile multimedia systems and thus the consistency in their approaches would be a signicant issue.

4. Techniques in supporting QoS Another inconsistency can be discovered in the way the QoS support is approached in different network designs, including IP networks and 2G/3G networks. In the following, we will address those approaches. After that, we will discuss how this inconsistency makes the support of QoS to be challenging in future wireless multimedia networks. 4.1. QoS support in the Internet IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), the main standard body for the Internet took two approaches toward QoS Internet, Integrated Services (IntServ) in 1994 [15] and Differentiated Services (DiffServ) in 1998 [16]. IntServ has been introduced in IP networks in order to provide guaranteed and controlled services in addition to the already available best-effort service. IntServ is an extension to the Internet architecture to support both non real-time and real-time applications over IP. Each trafc ow in this service can be classied under one of the three service classes, namely guaranteed-service, controlled-load service, and best-effort service. Guaranteedservice class provides for delay-bounded service agreements such as voice and other real-time applications that require severe delay constraints. Controlled-load service class on the other hand provides for a form of statistical delay service agreement, for example with a nominal mean delay. Finally, best-effort services have been included to match the current IP service mainly for interactive burst trafc (e.g. web), interactive bulk trafc (e.g. FTP) and background or asynchronous trafc (e.g. email). Guaranteed and controlled-load services are based on quantitative service requirements and require signaling and admission control at network nodes. Usually for this type of services a resource reservation protocol (RSVP) is used [17], in a hop-by-hop basis, considering the applications requirements (e.g. throughput guarantees, end-to-end delay bounds) for a given IP ow. RSVP is a signaling protocol used to reserve resources in the routers. The main advantages of the IntServ are that it provides service classes that are closely matching different application requirements; it leaves the existing best-effort service almost unchanged, so that no change will be necessary to the existing applications and they can continue to enjoy the current IP service; and nally, it leaves forwarding mechanism in the network unchanged, so that non-upgraded networks can still receive data from an IntServ network, without any problem. On the negative side, the architecture of IntServ requires that for an end-to-end service guarantee all intermediate nodes must support the service agreement for a given Internet ow. Therefore, in a network that somewhere in the intermediate path between the source and destination the service guarantee is not available,

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the whole issue of end-to-end guarantee will be lost. In addition, IntServs subdivision of the best-effort service may cause problems in commercial networks. DiffServ has been proposed to remedy the disadvantages of IntServ in providing QoS in IP networks. DiffServ aims at providing simple, scalable and exible service differentiation using a hierarchical model. That is, the resource management now divides into two domains: inter-domain and intra-domain. DiffServ also allows the network provider to differentiate among trafc streams, using different PerHop-Behaviors (PHB) when forwarding the IP packets of each stream. The advantage of such a scheme is its scalability, since many IP ows can be aggregated in the same trafc stream or behavior aggregate (BA). The PHB applies to an aggregate and is characterized by a DiffServ code point (DSCP) marked in the header of each IP packet. In IPv4 header the type-of-service (TOS) eld and in IPv6 header the trafc class (TC) eld can be used for this purpose, which in DiffServ terminology those are renamed as DS eld. PHBs are implemented on IP routers through the management of network resources, namely of classiers, markers, meters, queues, droppers and schedulers. These network resources are managed and allocated to trafc streams according to the provisioning policies of the network provider. At the local network (now named as local DS domain) three types of routers can be distinguished: access routers, interior DS routers, and border DS routers [18]. Interconnection of these routers is illustrated in Fig. 4. Access routers are the routers close to the end user hosts. Several access routers are connected to an interior router. So the interior routers are at the second level far from the end hosts.

At the highest level of the local DS domain, all interior routers are connected to a border DS router that connects the local DS domain to the outside world through the service provider network. The link between the border DS router and the service provider network will be contracted at the DS aggregate rate. At the inter-domain resource management, unidirectional service levels are agreed at each boundary point between a customer and a provider for trafc entering the provider network. At the intra-domain resource management on the other hand, the provider is solely responsible for conguration and provisioning of resources within its domain. Therefore, different from IntServ in which all control and resource management are performed on an endto-end basis, in DiffServ the local network has to share the resources allocated by the outside network (or the service provider) to its users. Scalability, simplicity and exibility of DiffServ compared with IntServ come from this hierarchical management. DiffServ does not impose either the number of trafc classes or their characteristics on a service provider. The provider builds its offered services with a combination of trafc classes, trafc conditioning and billing. In DiffServ architecture a service level agreement (SLA) is provided to govern the handling of trafc between a local network and the service provider network [19]. After that, it will be the local network to provide required services to its end users. Per-ow state is also avoided in DiffServ within the network, since individual ows are aggregated in classes and will be supported by the local network resource management using the available resources provided based on the SLA.

Fig. 4. Differentiated services network architecture and three types of DS routers.

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DiffServ comes with some advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, DiffServ provides kind of discrimination based on the payment for service. Trafc classes are accessible without additional signaling as a trafc class is predened aggregate of trafc. Network management will be simpler in DiffServ than in IntServ since the classication of the trafc needs to be performed in the end systems. On the negative side, DiffServ tries to keep the operating mode of the network simple by pushing as much complexity as possible onto the network provisioning and conguration. DiffServ also does not make providing several services with different qualities within the same network easier. Recently, it is proposed to apply the IntServ end-to-end model across a network containing one or more DiffServ regions [20]. Such a proposal completely endorses the use of RSVP as an end-to-end solution to provide QoS in the context of IntServ. Compared to a pure IntServ solution, this approach has some advantages because it removes the perow processing from the core routers. However, the perow processing remains essential at both edge and border routers. 4.2. QoS support in cellular networks Cellular systems have been mainly developed by cellular engineers mostly under the guidance of ITU (International Telecommunication Union) with little cooperation from the Internet community, In case of cellular systems, a completely different approach toward QoS support was taken. This is despite the fact that it was the inclusion of Internet applications, such as email and web browsing, and other related multimedia data services that has initiated the increasing demand in providing service quality in cellular networks. Such service inclusion necessarily insists on interconnecting the Internet and cellular networks, and thus, QoS support requires a harmonic design approach. GPRS denes the QoS requirements for each subscribed user in a QoS prole, which is dened and maintained at the GPRS network home location register (HLR). Serving GPRS support node (SGSN) is responsible for fullling the user QoS prole at all times, including periods that the user is located outside his home network. The QoS prole consists of a number of QoS indicators including trafc precedence, delay, reliability, peak throughput, and mean throughput. With a similar approach to GPRS, the 3G UMTS denes four QoS trafc classes: conversational, streaming, interactive, and background. Conversational trafc class refers to the trafc generated mostly from the real-time applications that usually require a constant bit rate (CBR) during the course of communications. Streaming trafc class usually requires a preserved time relation between the information entities of the stream. The increasing applications of streaming multimedia, including streaming audio and video over the Internet, are the main drivers for inclusion

of this trafc class in UMTS. Interactive trafc class refers to the trafc generated from applications such as web browsing and Internet games. Request response pattern and preserved data integrity are essential characteristics of these applications as for example it would be very unattractive or impractical to play an Internet game when the response time from different players are inconsistent or too long or at an unordered fashion. Background trafc class includes those data that come from delay insensitive applications such as email or FTP downloads. For this trafc class, the destination is not expecting the data within a certain period of time but the data integrity and reliable data transfer are very important. In Ref. [3] (and in the references provided thereafter) detailed discussions on UMTS QoS architecture and trafc classes are provided. We therefore limit our discussion on the issue in this paper. 4.3. End-to-end QoS support When we look at the QoS considerations in modern cellular networks and compare them with the QoS considerations within the Internet community in the form of IntServ and DiffServ, we can see very little harmonization between the approaches taken by the two major parts of the future wireless Internet. The Internet approach follows the instructions from computer experts within IETF whereas the cellular experts work on their own respects within the ITU. The two technologies however target the same thing; that is, providing QoS in future multimedia networks that support the Internet access to users regardless of their geographical location and physical access medium. Quality of service must be seen as an end-to-end process. Assume for example that you want to establish a video conferencing over the Internet using the UMTS as the access network for your communications. At the two very end points of this communications process we have the end user terminals, for example a cellular phone at one end and a desktop computer connected to the wired Internet at the other end. The access technology here thus compromised of several systems: the local bearer service providing the service to the cellular phone user, the UMTS bearer service, and the external bearer service providing service to the desktop user. Without support of the required QoS indicators (e.g. delay and bandwidth in our current example) by all segments of the network from end to end, we cannot claim that we have a QoS support. UMTS has its own share in providing the QoS but the end point bearer services also must support similar QoS indicators in order to complete the end-to-end process. Although it is possible to provide the QoS with different ways of support by the individual segments in the network, it will be much more efcient and reliable to provide QoS with close inter-relation between the individual segments.

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Mapping between different QoS trafc classes and the approaches taken by the intermediate systems could be a solution to the end-to-end QoS in future mobile multimedia networks. As an example, a resource control layer (RCL) architecture has been proposed in Ref. [3], which is claimed to provide an end-to-end QoS architecture using appropriate mapping between the QoS trafc classes dened by Internet and UMTS, respectively. The discussions given so far show that at this time we do not see a close relation between the Internet and cellular approaches in providing the QoS. They have targeted the QoS in their own approaches without much attention to the other. Providing end-to-end QoS with such a conguration would be a very difcult task, if it is not impossible, and therefore, there will be long time before we can see an end-to-end QoS support for the wireless Internet. Harmonization between the two approaches in a way that the service of one technology can cooperate and complement the service of the other remains the main issue toward the QoS establishment in future mobile multimedia networks.

5. TCP and QoS in heterogeneous networks In this section, we focus our discussion on performance of the commonly used transport protocol, TCP, in wireless cellular multimedia IP networks. The performance of TCP over wireless channel has been addressed in many papers in the past few years and several techniques to improve the poor performance of TCP in mobile networks have already been proposed. In this paper, however, we want to illustrate that how a simple characteristic of the cellular network could cause major problems in providing the QoS in multimedia and data trafc delivery. This can be considered as an example to illustrate the requirement of harmonic protocol design among respective systems within a heterogeneous wired and wireless network in order to support the QoS efciently. TCP is the most commonly used transport protocol in mobile Internet technology nowadays built on wireless cellular networks because of the increasing number of mobile data devices. TCP is a connection-oriented and it was specically designed to provide a reliable end-to-end connection over an unreliable network by using congestion and ow control mechanisms. TCP uses the congestion control algorithm to control the volume of data that the sender injects into the network [18]. Slow start phase of the congestion control is employed at the beginning of each le transfer and also if the TCPs retransmission timer expires. During the slow start phase, the TCP congestion window (cwnd) is increased exponentially from its initial value, usually set at one segment. In case when a packet loss happens, TCP resizes its cwnd to one and halves the threshold (the point at which the slow start phase is replaced with the congestion

avoidance phase) in order to avoid congestion in the network. Since TCP is optimized for wired networks, any packet loss is assumed to be as a result of network congestion and therefore, the transmitting rate should be decreased to avoid further congestions. In wireless networks, however, the high error rates could be a more probable reason for the packet loss, but this is not recognizable by the TCP [1]. In cellular networks, another issue is the existence of delay spikes, a sudden and sharp increase in network RTT (round trip time) delay. It is proposed in Ref. [21] that the TCPs initial window can be increased from one segment to roughly 4 KB for a better performance over the wireless cellular network. The main theory behind this is that the time required to increase the congestion window from an initial window size to the receivers advertised window is reduced and thus the throughput of small le transfers is improved. For the large-size le transfers, the performance improvement is indistinct because of the decreased impacts of the slow start on overall performance. Many studies have been performed to explore the effect of enlarging the initial congestion window. The results in Ref. [22] show that large initial windows can improve the throughput performance of TCP connections over satellite channels. Four-segment initial windows resulting in a small increase in the drop rate of 0.04 segments per transfer have been shown in Ref. [23]. A simulation study in Ref. [24] explores the impact of a larger initial window on competing network trafc. However, in these studies the sudden delay spikes exceeding the typical round-trip time (RTT) by several times of the communication path have not been considered. This is the main visible characteristic of the wireless cellular networks. TCP adopts a retransmission timer mechanism to ensure reliable delivery of data. If a packet remains unacknowledged for a long period of time, a retransmission timer timeout will occur and TCP will retransmit the original packet. The retransmission timeout value is dynamically determined by estimating the RTT samples of the connection. When a delay spike that exceeds a retransmission timeout value occurs, without a chance to adapt its retransmission timer to such a delay, TCP assumes that the outstanding segments have been lost and retransmits them accordingly and thus decreases the senders sending rate. Since the data packets are delayed but not lost, this retransmission is unnecessary and the timeout is spurious. Meanwhile, TCP will exponentially increase the retransmission timeout value, which leads to a long waiting time period if a congestion-type loss takes place and thus wastes the limited available bandwidth. A cellular networks link may often experiences delay spikes on the order of up to a few seconds [25]. Discussions on some reasons that the delay spikes are frequent in cellular networks are provided in Ref. [26]. Hence, evaluating performance of TCP with different initial window in wireless cellular networks becomes an important research topic for future wireless Internet systems.

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Fig. 5. The end-to-end wired/wireless network architecture.

Assume a simple network consists of a base station that connects a xed Internet host to a mobile station, as shown in Fig. 5. The connection between the xed host and the base station is a high-capacity link of 1 Mbps with short propagation delay of 1 ms while the wireless link can offer only about 50 Kbps at 2 ms propagation delay. The base station is assumed to have innite buffer capacity so there will be no packet drop because of buffer overow. The base station sends out TCP packets as soon as they arrive based on a rst-in-rst-serve policy. Due to 20 times lower speed on the wireless link however, the packets have to wait at the base station for some time before relaying to the mobile host. TCP Reno is used in the network of Fig. 5 as a common version of TCP used in todays Internet. This simple network can provide signicant results on performance of the TCP in cellular network. If we dene the throughput as the total number of bits successfully received by the receiver divided by the time elapsed for the successful transmission, when there is no delay spikes change of TCP initial window size in the network has no effect on the throughput. This is because the processing delay at the base station is larger than propagation delay of each link and thus the processing delay is the main factor in the RTT, which determines the link throughput. On the other hand if we look at the transmission rate dened as the total number of bits successfully
x 105
16KB transfer 32KB transfer 64KB transfer 1MB transfer

transferred by the sender divided by the time elapsed for the transmission, when there is no delay spikes, the transmission rate will be increased by enlarging the initial TCP window size, as shown in Fig. 6, for different le transfer size. The results shown in this gure are based on assumptions of a system model given in Fig. 5. With the expansion of le size, the transmission rates increasing trend is becoming rather smoother than the case for smaller le size. For very large le transfers (e.g. 1 MB), the transmission rate of the sender is the same for all initial window values due to the reduced impact of the TCP slow start on total performance and the limitation of advertised window size of the receiver. Now let us consider the case where the delay spike does exist, as a usual case for cellular systems. Fig. 7 shows the effect of changing the initial size of the TCP congestion window on the end-to-end throughput while transferring a 32 KB le. In this gure, p is the probability of the burst delay, and therefore, altering p can change the density of burst delays. Three values of p equals to 0.05, 0.1, and 0.2 are used here, which can represent typical situations in cellular networks, where a burst delay occurs only with the low probability in order of 520% when the user is mobile. As the burst delay in cellular networks is always in order of seconds [26], the length of burst delay is set to be between 1 and 10 s with a uniform distribution. Irrespective of the le size, by increasing the TCP initial window size, the throughput is decreased for all three values of the probability p. This is completely a different result compared with the case when there was no delay spikes in the network, where the throughput has remained unchanged. Therefore, we can conclude that the delay spikes have a negative impact on performance of the TCP in wireless networks. It is observed that in the presence of delay spikes, the average throughput is far below the levels for a network

2 1.8 Transmission rate of sender (bps) 1.6

14000 12000

p=0.05 p=0.1 p=0.2

1.4 Throughput (bps) 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 initial window (segment) 16 18 20 1.2 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 0.2 0 10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 initial window (segment) 16 18 20

Fig. 6. Effect of initial window size on transmission rate of the TCP sender without delay spikes.

Fig. 7. Effect of initial window size on throughput with delay spikes for a 32 KB le transfer.

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without any delay spikes. By increasing the frequency of occurrence of the delay spikes on the wireless link, the reduction in the average throughput becomes even more. It is also found that increasing the frequency of occurrence of the delay spike above pZ0.2 has a little effect on reduction of throughput. Comparing with the case without delay spikes, in a network with delay spikes we will have a smooth change of the retransmission timer with the timeout value ranging from 1.5 to 3 s. For the burst delay smaller than 1.5 s, a timeout will not occur, so the throughput is the same for all initial windows. For a burst delay larger than 1.5 s, a timeout may occur. With large initial window, the TCP sender sends more packets. As a result, more packets are waiting at the base station. So there are more unnecessary retransmitted packets for larger initial window and thus degrades the throughput. In the long run, the throughput is degraded with increasing the initial window size. Delay spike is a prominent feature of the wireless cellular networks and consideration of it has a vital role in the research toward the wireless Internet. The interaction of delay spikes with initial window size is studied here. In summary, the results have shown that the TCP performance over cellular networks with a bottleneck link is unaffected by enlarging the initial window size when there is no delay spikes. Additional congestions are considered under this kind of network topology. With the effect of delay spikes, increasing the initial window size degrades the end-to-end TCP throughput.

References
[1] A. Jamalipour, The Wireless Mobile InternetArchitectures, Protocols, and Services, Wiley, Chichester, England, 2003. [2] D. Chalmers, D. Chalmers, M. Sloman, A survey of quality of service in mobile computing environments IEEE Communications Surveys, Second Quarter, 1999, pp. 210. [3] S.I. Maniatis, E.G. Nikolouzou, I.S. Venieris, et al., QoS issues in the converged 3G wireless and wired networks, IEEE Communications Magazine 40 (8) (2002) 4453. [4] M. Umehira, et al., Wireless and IP integrated system architectures for broadband mobile multimedia services, Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC99), New Orleans, 1999. [5] J.P. Macker, V.D. Park, M.S. Corson, Mobile and wireless Internet services: Putting the pieces together, IEEE Communications Magazine 39 (6) (2001) 148155. [6] M.W. Oliphant, The mobile phone meets the Internet, IEEE Spectrum 6 (1998) 2028. [7] J.W. Noerenberg II, Bridging wireless protocols, IEEE Communications Magazine 39 (11) (2001) 9097. [8] P.J. McCann, T. Hiller, An internet infrastructure for cellular CDMA networks using mobile IP, IEEE Personal Communications Magazine 7 (4) (2000) 612. [9] R. Ramjee, T.F. La Porta, S. Thuel, K. Varadhan, IP-based access network architecture for next-generation wireless data networks, IEEE Personal Communications Magazine 7 (4) (2000) 3441. [10] Mobile Wireless Internet Forum (MWIF) web site: http://www. mwif.org. [11] R. Berezdivin, Next-generation wireless communications concepts and technologies, IEEE Communications Magazine 40 (3) (2002) 108116. [12] M. Frodigh, Future-generation wireless networks, IEEE Personal Communications 8 (5) (2001) 1017. [13] E. Gustafsson, Always best connected, IEEE Wireless Communications 10 (1) (2003) 4955. [14] W. Kellerer, A communication gateway for infrastructure-independent 4G wireless access, IEEE Communications Magazine 40 (3) (2002) 126131. [15] Braden, et al., Integrated services in the Internet architecture: an overview, RFC 1633, June 1994. [16] Blake, et al., An architecture for differentiated services, RFC 2475, December 1998. [17] L. Zhang, RSVP: A new resource reservation protocol, IEEE Network 7 (5) (1993). [18] J.F. Kurose, K.W. Ross, Computer NetworkingA Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, Addison Wesley, Boston, MA, 2001. [19] Service level specication semantics and parameters, IETF Internet Draft (work in progress), February 2002, http://search.ietf.org/ internet-drafts/draft-tequila-sls-02.txt. [20] Bernet, et al., A framework for integrated services operation over DiffServ networks, RFC 2998, November 2000. [21] M. Allman, S. Floyd, C. Partridge, Increasing TCPs initial window, IETF Internet Draft draft-ietf-tsvwg-initwin-04.txt, June 2002. [22] M. Allman, Improving TCP performance over satellite channels, Master Thesis, Ohio University, June 1997. [23] M. Allman, C. Hayes, S. Ostermann, An evaluation of TCP with larger initial windows, ACM Computer Communication Review, July 1998. [24] K. Poduri, K. Nichols, Simulation studies of increased initial TCP window size, IETF RFC 2415, September 1998. [25] A. Gurtov, Effect of delays on TCP performance, Proceedings of IFIP Personal Wireless Communications, August 2001. [26] R. Ludwig, A. Gurtovm, F. Khazov, TCP over 2.5G/3G, Internet Draft draft-ietf-pilc-2.5g3g-10.txt, July 2002.

6. Conclusions In this paper, some fundamental issues in supporting quality of service in future mobile multimedia and IP systems have been discussed. The QoS has been named in this paper as a term that should be looked on the basis of end-to-end. In future mobile networks where the transmission of multimedia and IP trafc is a mandate, then the end-to-end QoS has to be supported by all intermediate systems. Therefore, appropriate harmonization or mapping techniques are needed to be in place among the systems of heterogeneous networks. As an example, performance of the Internet main transport protocol has been evaluated in the presence of cellular delays spikes. Optimization of the TCP to work efciently in both wired and wireless networks thus is a key element in supporting end-to-end QoS in future mobile multimedia networks.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Fei Xin for numerical results on TCP performance provided in the paper.

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A. Jamalipour, P. Lorenz / Computer Communications 29 (2006) 671682 Pascal Lorenz (lorenz@ieee.org) received a PhD degree from the University of Nancy, France. Between 1990 and 1995 he was a research engineer at WorldFIP Europe and at AlcatelAlsthom. He is a Professor at the University of Haute-Alsace and responsible of the Network and Telecommunication Research Group. His research interests include QoS, wireless networks and high-speed networks. He was the Program and Organizing Chair of the IEEE ICATM98, ICATM99, ECUMN00, ICN01, ECUMN02 and ICT03, ICN04 conferences and co-program chair of ICC04. Since 2000, he is a Technical Editor of the IEEE Communications Magazine Editorial Board. He is the secretary of the IEEE ComSoc Communications Systems Integration and Modeling Technical Committee. He is senior member of the IEEE, member of many international program committees and he has served as a guest editor for a number of journals including Telecommunications Systems, IEEE Communications Magazine and LNCS. He has organized and chaired several technical sessions and gave tutorials at major international conferences. He is the author of three books and 135 international publications in journals and conferences.

Abbas Jamalipour (a.jamalipour@ieee.org) is with the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia, where he is responsible for teaching and research in wireless data communication networks, wireless IP networks, network security and cellular communications. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Nagoya University, Japan. He is the author of The Wireless Mobile InternetArchitectures, Protocols and Services, John Wiley & Sons 2003. In addition, he has authored another book on satellite communication networks with Artech House in 1998, and coauthored three other technical books on wireless telecommunications. He has authored over 130 papers in major journals and international conferences. He has organized several special issues on the topic of 3G and beyond wireless cellular systems as well as broadband wireless networks in IEEE magazines and journals. He is a technical editor to the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, IEEE Communications Magazine, and the Wiley International Journal of Communication Systems. Professor Jamalipour is the Technical Program Vice-Chair of IEEE WCNC2005, Co-Chair of Symposium on Next Generation Networks for Universal Services, IEEE ICC2005, Technical Program Vice-Chair IEEE HPSR 2005, Technical Program Chair for the Wireless Communications Symposium, IEEE GLOBECOM2005, and Technical Program Co-Chair of Symposium on Next Generation Networks, IEEE ICC2006. He is a Fellow Member of IEAust; a Senior Member of IEEE; Chair of IEEE Communications Society Satellite and Space Communications Technical Committee; Vice Chair of Asia Pacic Board, Technical Affairs Committee; and Vice Chair of Communications Switching and Routing Technical Committee.