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Assignment 1
Advance Wireless Networks
(QoS Survey)
Neil Patrick Harris
ID # 10121212

I. D EFINITIONS
J. Jung in [4] defines quality of service as:
Quality of Service (QoS) is the collective effect of service performances which determine the
degree of satisfaction of a user of the service.
A similar definition is given in [1]
Totality of characteristics of a telecommunications service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated
and implied needs of the user of the service.
A. Explanation
Quality of service requirements define the required aspects of connection by the user of a particular
network. Some examples are signal-to-noise ratio, echo, connecting delay and cross-talk for telephony
users. For internet users, these requirements might be, available bandwidth, packet loss, access delay and
loading time etc. Maintaining these parameters is essential to provide good quality service to the end user
and hence these (or similar) parameters are the ones which define QoS requirement of any network.
II. M ECHANISM
Different mechanisms are adopted to ensure QoS requirements of different type of networks. For
example, circuit switched networks like PSTN have QoS in their core protocol and hence no extraordinary
further efforts are required in order to maintain QoS for the end user. The only important (usually not
very severe) is to maintain blocking probability Pb below a threshold. This can be very easily met by
employing extra network resources.
In the case of packet-switched networks, QoS might refer to any combination of stability of service,
delays, availability, reliability and effectiveness. There can be several problems associated with a packetswitched network which may degrade the QoS parameters. Some of the examples can be jitter (uneven
delay between packets), errors (corruption of packets), latency (increasing delay with time), dropped
packets etc.
Mechanism to maintain a minimum QoS depends on the network type. As mentioned above, in circuit
switching networks, QoS provisioning is catered in the core protocol definitions and hence no extra
procedure is required to achieve it.
In case of packet-switched network (e.g. internet), most common approaches are the followings.
A. Redundant Resources
One very simple and somewhat non-technical solution is to provide redundant resources. It is also
termed as over-provisioning. Extra resources are provided in the network generously so that capacity
of traffic reaches the peak resource requirements. This way overloading can be avoided. This approach
provides reasonable performance for many applications. However, this approach has very limited use. It

can only work in the case of simple networks whose resource requirements increase slowly with time.
In case of transport protocols such as TCP, this approach fails. In such protocols, resource requirement
increases exponentially with time and hence this approach becomes very expensive or simply impractical.
This approach can not be utilized in case of general packet-switched networks e.g. internet. Following
two approaches can be utilized in the modern day packet-switched networks.
B. Integrated Services
Commonly referred to as IntServ, employs the parameterized approach. It allows applications to
request and reserve the resources of network through Resource Reservation Protocol. This approach
somewhat resembles the circuit-switched networks i.e. a resource is reserved once a connection is established.
C. Differentiated Services
This approach is referred to as DiffServ. It implements prioritized approach. Traffic is assigned
different priority levels according to its nature. For example Telephony might be given higher priority
than video streaming which might be given higher priority than email. All different type of traffic might
adopt different routes to travel from source to destination.
IntServ was employed earlier but limited scalability of this approach was soon realized. Now, in the
modern networks, DiffServ is employed to maintain QoS.
III. C ASE S TUDY
QoS in WLAN is chosen as a case study in this assignment. [2] reports a simulation analysis of IEEE
802.11 of wireless LAN to advanced data application. [5] discusses IEEE 802.11e WLAN quality of
service in general. It mainly discusses Medium Access Control (MAC) enhancements. This case study
mainly uses material reported in [3]
QoS manages bandwidth more efficiently across LAN, WLAN and WAN by doing the following:
Supposrting dedicated bandwidth for critical users and applications.
Controlling the jitter and latency
Managing and minimizing network congestion
Shaping network traffic to smooth the traffic flow
Setting network traffic priorities
To unify the wireless adoptation across different vendors and devices, a standard protocol is defined.
This protocol is called IEEE 802.11e which is part of IEEE 802.11 general protocol. Main QoS parameters
in this protocol are as follows.
Transmission
Quality
Latency
Jitter
Loss

Description
It is end-to-end delay between transmission and receiving node. It can be fixed
or variable depending on the network conditions.
It is the variance in the latency. i.e. difference of time between two packets
to complete end-to-end travel.
It defines the number of packets dropped during a communication. It is mostly
expressed as the percentage of packets what were dropped during transmission.
TABLE I
M AIN Q O S PARAMTERS , TAKEN FROM [3]

Data frames in 802.11 are sent using distributed coordination function (DCF). It consists of two
functions.
Interframe spaces

Random Backoff
Interframe spaces allow the protocol to control which traffic gets first access to the channel. Whereas
Random backoff makes the packet wait until the channel is assured to be free for uninterrupted transmission
of packet.
Random backoff is defined by two parameters, aCWmin and aCWmax. Initially, a packet is assigned
a random number between 0 and aCWmin and waits for getting the channel free for transmission. If
transmission fails, this number is doubled and this process repeats until aCWmax is achieved. Retries
continue with a random number between 0 and aCWmax until maximum retires or packets time-to-live
(TTL) is reached. This process of doubling the backoff window is called binary exponenstial backoff
level. Both these interframe spaces and random backoff help implement QoS for WLAN.
Some vendors like CISCO allow creating profiles for different type of traffic. CISCO centralized WLAN
architecture gives four profiles, platinum, gold, silver and bronze. They are for voice, video, best effort
and background applications respectively. These profiling allows modifying per-user bandwidth contracts,
over the air QoS and wired QoS protocol. This gives further capability to control users based on their
network applications.
Some other tunable parameters to modify QoS are as follows
Admission control (Before connection, availability of resources for coming connection is ensured.)
Max RF Bandwidth (%) (Max allowable bandwidth to be used in normal operation)
Reserved roaming bandwidth (Bandwidth reserved for roaming purpose)
Baseline Priority mapping (mapping a baseline priorities for different type of applications)
Average Data Rate (allowable for a user)
Burst Data Rate (per user basis)
Average Real-Time Data (per user)
Burst Real-Time Data (per user)
Maximum RF usage per AP (%)
Using these parameters, QoS of WLAN can be modified to suit particular needs of the network. Not only
these parameters can be modified but they can also be defined for different network profiles as mentioned
earlier. All these parameters are particularly associated with IEEE 802.11e standard for WLAN.

IV. C ONCLUSION
This assignment discussed general definition and mechanism of QoS in first two sections. In third
section, IEEE 802.11e is discussed as a case study. Several tunable parameters are discussed which can
be used to improve QoS for particular applications for transmission over WLAN. It is emphasized that
these variables can be set to different values for different profiles. Type of traffic can be determined
from packet headers or by employing Wireless Multimedia broadcast where each node defines the type
of traffic it is going to use so that resources can be allocated to it accordingly. So, best quality service
can be provided to each user according to its needs.

R EFERENCES
[1] Quality of telecommunication services: concepts, models, objectives and dependability planning Terms and definitions related to the
quality of telecommunication services, e.800 edition, 09 2008. SERIES E: OVERALL NETWORK OPERATION, TELEPHONE
SERVICE, SERVICE OPERATION AND HUMAN FACTORS.
[2] Giuseppe Anastasi and Luciano Lenzini. Qos provided by the ieee 802.11 wireless lan to advanced data applications: a simulation
analysis. Wireless Networks, 6(2):99100, 2000.
[3] CISCO. Voice over Wireless LAN 4.1 Design Guide. Cisco Systems, Inc., 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, CA 95134-1706 USA,
2010.
[4] Jae-Il Jung. Quality of service in telecommunications. i. proposition of a qos framework and its application to b-isdn. Communications
Magazine, IEEE, 34(8):108111, 1996.
[5] Stefan Mangold, Sunghyun Choi, Peter May, Ole Klein, Guido Hiertz, and Lothar Stibor. Ieee 802.11 e wireless lan for quality of
service. In Proc. European Wireless, volume 2, pages 3239, 2002.