Analytical model for an assured forwarding differentiated service over wireless links

A weakness of the current structure of the Internet is that it does not provide the capability to support a wide range of QoS. This problem will worsen as wireless services become more popular and need to be supported using the Internet. A new model, known as differentiated service (DiffServ), has been proposed by IETF to extend the Internet to be a QoS-capable, scaleable and efficient network. Whereas DiffServ has received considerable attention from researchers, few analytical studies on supporting a wireless DiffServ have been published. The authors formulate a simple analytical model for the assured forwarding class of differentiated service over wireless links. Based on the assumption of a slowly fading channel and the use of a RIO queue management policy, they obtain expressions for performance measures that characterise the service provided to different kinds of packets. Although the model is simple, it is computationally efficient and numerical results generated using the model closely match those obtained using simulation.