Toward the QoS Support in 4G Wireless Systems

This paper presents a novel approach to support Quality of Service for wireless multimedia applications in the context of 4G wireless systems. Adopting a Service Oriented Architecture, it is inspired to Open Wireless Architectures (OWA), building a suitable framework over the top of the heterogeneous wireless MACs. It lets to enhance the existing QoS support provided by standard MAC protocols and it uses the contract model to guarantee QoS, taking into account the applications requests. It negotiates dynamically Application Level Contracts which will be translated seamlessly in Resource Level Contracts for the underlying network services. It receives the feedback by underlying network services to adjust the scheduling algorithms and policies to provide soft guarantees. The framework comprises QoS Manager, Admission Control, Enhanced Scheduler, Predictor and Feedback System. In particular, the QoS manager component is a middleware between applications and lower network layers and it is able to dynamically manage available resources under different load conditions in a transparent manner to application level.