Technical reports

Handling realtime traffic in mobile networks

Subir Kumar Biswas

September 1994, 198 pages

This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted August 1994 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Darwin College.

DOI: 10.48456/tr-351

Abstract

The rapidly advancing technology of cellular communication and wireless LAN makes ubiquitous computing feasible where the mobile users can have access to the location independent information and the computing resources. Multimedia networking is another emerging technological trend of the 1990s and there is an increasing demand for supporting continuous media traffic in wireless personal communication environment. In order to guarantee the strict performance requirements of realtime traffic, the connection-oriented approaches are proving to be more efficient compared to the conventional datagram based networking. This dissertation deals with a network architecture and its design issues for implementing the connection-oriented services in a mobile radio environment.

The wired backbone of the proposed wireless LAN comprises of high speed ATM switching elements, connected in a modular fashion, where the new switches and the user devices can be dynamically added and reconnected for maintaining a desired topology. A dynamic reconfiguration protocol, which can cope with these changing network topologies, is proposed for the present network architecture. The details about a prototype implementation of the protocol and a simulation model for its performance evaluation are presented.

CSMA/AED, a single frequency and carrier sensing based protocol is proposed for the radio medium access operations. A simulation model is developed in order to investigate the feasibility of this statistical and reliable access scheme for the proposed radio network architecture. The effectiveness of a per-connection window based flow control mechanism, for the proposed radio LAN, is also investigated. A hybrid technique is used, where the medium access and the radio data-link layers are modelled using the mentioned simulator; an upper layer end-to-end queueing model, involving flow dependent servers, is solved using an approximate Mean Value Analysis technique which is augmented for faster iterative convergence.

A distributed location server, for managing mobile users’ location information and for aiding the mobile connection management tasks, is proposed. In order to hide the effects of mobility from the non-mobile network entities, the concept of a per-mobile software entity, known as a “representative”, is introduced. A mobile connection management scheme is also proposed for handling the end-to-end network layer connections in the present mobile environment. The scheme uses the representatives and a novel connection caching technique for providing the necessary realtime traffic support functionalities.

A prototype system, comprising of the proposed location and the connection managers, has been built for demonstrating the feasibility of the presented architecture for transporting continuous media traffic. A set of experiments have been carried out in order to investigate the impacts of various design decisions and to identify the performance-critical parts of the design.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-351,
  author =	 {Biswas, Subir Kumar},
  title = 	 {{Handling realtime traffic in mobile networks}},
  year = 	 1994,
  month = 	 sep,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-351.ps.gz},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-351},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-351}
}