Architecture and experimental results for quality of service in mobile networks using RSVP and CBQ

Efforts are underway to enhance the Internet with Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for transporting real-time data. The issue of wireless networks and mobile hosts being able to support applications that require QoS has become very significant. The ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) provides a signaling mechanism for end-to-end QoS negotiation. RSVP has been designed to work with wired networks. To make RSVP suitable for wireless networks, changes need to be made by: (i) changing the way control messages are sent, and (ii) introducing wireless/mobile specific QoS parameters that take into account the major features of wireless networks, namely, high losses, low bandwidth, power constraints and mobility. In this paper, an architecture with a modified RSVP protocol that helps to provide QoS support for mobile hosts is presented. The modified RSVP protocol has been implemented in an experimental wireless and mobile testbed to study the feasibility and performance of our approach. Class Based Queueing (CBQ) which is used as the underlying bandwidth enforcing mechanism is also modified to fit our approach. The experimental results show that the modified RSVP and CBQ help in satisfying resource requests for mobile hosts, after handoff occurs. The experiments also show how different power and loss profile mechanisms can be used with our framework. The system performance using the modified RSVP control mechanism is also studied.