Full Paper Proc. of Int. Conf.

on Advances in Computing, Control, and Telecommunication Technologies 2011

Optimization of Quality of Service in 4G Wireless Networks

Firas Ousta*, Nidal Kamel*, Mohd Zuki* and Charles Sarraf**
*Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak, Malaysia **mtctouch, Beirut Lebanon

Abstract4G radio access technologies should be able to provide different types of IP services. These services rang from narrow-band to broadband, from non-real-time to real-time, and from unicast to multicast broadcast applications. When the need arises for different levels of user mobility the access systems are required with advanced capabilities of radio resource management and Quality of Service (QoS). We present, in this paper, the different QoS approaches by the various wireless and connectivitys networks as well as the issues that will face their implementations in 4G. Index Terms4G Mobile Networks, QoS, Mobile IP, Wireless Networks

The structure of this paper is as follows, section 2 will provides an Introduction to 4G, Overview of QoS and various definitions and specifications, ITU, 3GPP, WiMAX, IP, etc will be presented in Section 3. We present, in section 4, an overview of related work regarding End-to-End QoS in 4G Mobile Networks. And finally section 5 will conclude by summing up, pointing out the main issues and challenges providing some guidelines for future works II. 4G OVERVIEW In the past decade, the telecommunications industry has witnessed an ever accelerated growth the usage of mobile communications. As a result, the mobile communications technology has evolved from the so-called second generation (2G) technologies, GSM in Europe, IS-95 (CDMA) and IS-136 (TDMA) in USA, to the third generation (3G) technologies, UMTS/WCDMA in Europe and cdma2000 in USA, being standardized by 3GPP and 3GPP2. Further the mobile industry has also witnessed an accelerated data transmission and wireless Internet with higher and higher bandwidth supported from GPRS (General Packet Radio System) to 3G technologies such as HSPDA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), through 2.75G EDGE and other packet data access in CDMA and TDMA [2]. In the wireless access field, various technologies have emerged such as Bluetooth which was developed as a new cable replacement technology providing a short-range (~10m), low bit rate (1Mbps) access in the 2.4GHz spectrums. IEEE also developed a wireless LAN (WLAN) access family of protocol IEEE 802.11a/b/g/ operating over 100m range and different spectrum access such as 2.4 GHz for 802.11b/g and 5.2 GHz for 802.11a as well as WiMAX (802.16) as WMAN. Nowadays, 802.11 and 802.16 have become widely popular and easy ways to provide wireless access for laptop and PDA users which can easily use VoIP for voice communication, even many cellular phones and smart phones that have the capabilities to access WiFi have recently been available in the market. Even though a universal consensus on what is going to be 4G is not yet reached in the industry or the literature, there is a reasonable understanding of some characteristics of 4G mobile networks [3]. Some of the accepted characteristics are: All-IP based network architecture; Higher bandwidth; Support for different access networks, including 21

I. INTRODUCTION Some of the most important trends, over the last decades, are the significant developments, deployments and the tremendous growth in use of Mobile Networks from one side and the Internet from the other side. Even more, this tremendous growth, in both technologies, have a great impact on developing various applications catered for mobility and real-time access that will fundamentally change the environment of the telecommunications networks. These new development presents important challenges for the telecommunication and Internet industries as well as the current network architectures and infrastructures. An explosive growth is expected in mobile communications [1], based heterogeneous wireless access technologies, over the next decade with higher speeds and larger capacities than provided by 3G mobile systems. Various generations of cellular, broadband wireless, WLANs and WMANs will integrate to support services which vary in bandwidth, delay, and mobility 3G mobile networks such as UMTS and cdma2000 from one side and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) and WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) from the other side will allow operators to deliver high quality voice, video and data services. Therefore 3GPP have defined many paths to 4G migration including W-CDMA, UMTS, cdma2000, WiFi and WiMAX based networks The end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) of an application depends on the overall performance achieved by the different components, spread over many domains and owned by different network and service providers, therefore the issue of End-to-End QoS must be addressed when designing and deploying 4G networks and applications as well as mapping between the different QoS parameters and messages at setup level as well as when roaming, including handovers, vertically and horizontally. 2011 ACEEE DOI: 02.ACT.2011.03. 75

Full Paper Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computing, Control, and Telecommunication Technologies 2011 and WiMAX technologies; Worldwide roaming capability; Full integration of hot spot and cellular; Support for multimedia applications. Location management deals with tracking user mobility, and handling information about original, current and (if possible) future cells and networks. Moreover it also must deal with authentication issues and QoS assurances [4]. Fig. 1 depicts a logical architecture of 4G mobile networks. Such architecture may consist of several Access Service Networks (ASN) of different technologies. The ASN may be connected to Connectivity Service Network (CSN) of a visited network, which may be connected over an IP-based network to the home mobile network. Connections to the Internet may occur at either the visiting network or the home network. There are so many key challenges to migrate the current systems to 4G. The research areas that present key challenges to migrate current systems to 4G are many but can be summarized in the following: Mobile Station, System and Service [4]. Stations mobility must be able to provide wireless services anytime, everywhere. This implies that roaming between different networks must be automatic and transparent to the user. There are two major issues in stations mobility, location management and handoff management.
WLAN

publications, its framework does suffer from not being application-oriented and in many areas, too vague to use. The ITU-T recommendation [6] focuses on four different points of view: Customers QoS requirements; Service providers offering of QoS; QoS achieved or delivered; Customer survey rating of QoS. Relationships between these four points of views is presented if Fig. 2.

Figure 2. The four viewpoints of QoS

However the main problems in this ITU-T Rec. were not being specific by defining target and/or thresholds values for acceptable criterias. Reference [7] defines a model for multimedia Quality of Service categories from an end-user viewpoint. By considering user expectations for a range of multimedia applications, eight distinct categories have been identified, based on tolerance to key parameters impacting the user such as delay and information loss, as shown in Fig. 3.

Figure 1. Local architecture of a 4G Mobile Network

III. OVERVIEW OF QOS Some of the major challenges of migrating the current systems to 4G are QoS provisioning and security services for mobile users communication flows [4]. The QoS problems consist of two major issues: 1. Mapping QoS parameters over different access/ connectivity network at call setup. 2. Maintain these QoS when Users move to different access networks that may cause changes in backbone and connectivitys networks. The different radio access and connectivity networks have, through their standardization and specifications, defined QoS parameters and classes. A. ITU ITU-T [5] defines QoS as the collective effect of service performance which determine the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service. Even though the definition of QoS in ITU-T Rec. E-800 is widely used and referred to from most 2011 ACEEE DOI: 02.ACT.2011.03.75 22

Figure 3. Mapping of user-centric QoS Requirements

B. QoS in UMTS Frameworks for QoS within UMTS [8] and end-to-end QoS involving GPRS[17] have been provided by 3GPP. The main purpose in [8] is to specify the list of attributes applicable to UMTS Bearer Service and Radio Bearer Service, as well as describe the Quality of Service architecture to be used in UMTS networks, while [9] describes a the interaction between the TE/MT Local Bearer Service, the GPRS Bearer Service, and the external Bearer Service, and how these together provide Quality of Service for the End-to-End Service. Such architecture is depicted in Fig. 4.

Full Paper Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computing, Control, and Telecommunication Technologies 2011 have been therefore proposed to introduce traffic differentiation in IEEE 802.11 [10][11][12]. All these proposals require substantial changes to the current MAC protocol, leading to both higher channel utilization and effective differentiation among traffic flows. Although a wide consensus exists on a new standard, named IEEE 802.11e, including most of these mechanisms [13], more work is still needed to make this proposal fully operational and to fully support the 4G requirements. E. QoS in WiMAX (802.16) Similar to 802.11, the QoS in WiMAX networks is usually managed at the medium access control (MAC) layer. [14][15] detail the QoS support in WiMAX networks issues. However the latest specification of WiMAX, 802.16e [16] has defined 5 different categories for QoS as outlined in Table 1.
TABLE 1. WIMAX QOS
CATEGORIES

Figure 4. UMTS End-to-End QoS architecture

[9] Also defines four QoS classes, corresponding to different traffic QoS requirements (mainly, delay tolerance): Conversational class. Audio and video communications with real time constraints. Streaming class. This class comprises applications for downloading multimedia contents (audio and video) that are reproduced on-line. Interactive class. Remote access applications, in which a human or a machine sends requests to a distant server and waits for an answer in a reasonable time. Background class. A whole range of data applications for which delay is not a concern. A framework for IP end-to-end QoS negotiation and policy requirements is also provided through the definition of a logical element, the Policy Decision Function (PDF), which enables the coordination between events in the application layer and resource management in the IP bearer layer, that can be realized by different ways including: signaling along the flow path (e.g. RSVP, LDP); packet marking or labeling (e.g. DiffServ, MPLS); interaction between Policy Control and/ or Resource Management elements; and Service Level Agreements (SLA) enforced by the border routers between networks. C. QoS in cdma2000 The CDMA2000 standard is well poised to provide a simplified and an elegant solution to not only meets the needs of user perception of end-to-end QoS at the application layer but ensures efficient utilization of system resources. CDMA2000 defines two modes of QoS [18]: Assured Mode QoS and Non-assured mode QoS. The different modes of packet data services are in turn are determined by an exclusive set of Mobile Station specified QoS parameters. [17] Presents an overview of the architecture and implementation of an end-to-end QoS for CDMA2000 networks D. QoS in WiFi (802.11) Despite the great success of the IEEE 802.11 standard, several problems concerning security, power consumption and quality of service of wireless LANs remain partially unsolved. Although the current standard includes an optional traffic differentiation mechanism based on polling, it does not cover the needed requirements for 4G. Many mechanisms 2011 ACEEE DOI: 02.ACT.2011.03.75 23

F. QoS in IP network In addition, the QoS of IP networks, both mobile and fixed IP/IPv6 are also very important issues in providing the Endto-End QoS in 4G mobile networks. During the last years the Internet community spent many efforts to develop an Internet QoS architecture based on various protocols such as Integrated Services (IntServ) [19], Resource Reservation Protocol (RSVP) [20] and Differential Services (DiffServ) [21]. However, RSVP and IntServ approach may not be deployed in large-scale Internet backbones due to scaling and billing problems. Also, these protocols have been designed in the context of fixed environments (hosts and networks) and as result, they may not fully adapted to mobile environments when Mobile IP is used for mobility management. As matter of fact, there are several issues about QoS in Mobile IPv6: Handover and roaming in heterogeneous QoS domains, roaming between dissimilar media and no advanced resource reservation [22] [23].

Full Paper Proc. of Int. Conf. on Advances in Computing, Control, and Telecommunication Technologies 2011 IV. END-TO-END QOS IN 4G General and En-to-End QoS in mobile heterogeneous environments have been studies and may architecture have been proposed. In [24] the authors presents a comparative analysis of alternative approaches that have been developed by IEEE, 3GPP and others for handover of PSTN and Internet sessions among multiple wireless technologies including UMTS, WiFi, WiMAX, Mobile-Fi and WPANs. [25] proposes a possible architecture of integrating UMTS and 802.11 WLAN. New functionalities and interfaces in addition to some extension to the existing SIP signalling are defined in [26] to resolve some of the existing problems existing in UMTS that dont let End-to-End QoS control between different technologies and domains. The authors of [27] presents a network and mobile client architecture that provides seamless roaming and mobility while maintaining connectivity across, UMTS and 802.16 these wireless networks providing quality of service (QoS) support. [28] proposes a mechanism that supports Always Best-Connected (ABC) Quality of service (QoS) to the application in a heterogeneous network. The heterogeneous network consists of IEEE 802.11e WLAN and IEEE802.16d WiMAX access networks. A policy-based multi-domain QoS management architecture that provides consistent QoS control over an integrated UMTS and WLAN system is proposed in [29]. [30] describes a global QoS architecture for multimedia traffic in mobile heterogeneous environments covering WiFi and WCDMA. This architecture supports both multiple access networks and multiple service provider scenarios. The architecture is able to provide QoS per user and per service, implementing the notion of a user profile associated with control element functions. A solution allow for two-hop wireless paths between WLAN and 3G systems, and performing control over-high layer issues, specifically focusing on End-to-End QoS provisioning is proposed in [31]. The authors in [32] present architecture for supporting End-to-End QoS in WiFi and WCDMA based networks. This QoS architecture is able to support multi-service, multioperator environments, handling complex multimedia services, with per user and per service differentiation, and integrating mobility aspects. V. DISCUSSIONS One of the major problems, in migrating the current systems to 4G are End-to-End QoS provisioning. These problems could be addressed from two different angles: Mapping QoS parameters over different access/ connectivity networks at call setup. Maintain these QoS when Users handover, both vertically and horizontally, by moving to different Access Service Networks. Moving across different Access Service Networks may cause the route to move to different Connectivitys service Networks and external backbone networks. 24 None of works presented in Section (IV) has addressed the full scope of End-to-End QoS in 4G networks. Theses works have either addressed some, most likely 2, of the access networks or addressed the QoS for specific applications such as multimedia. The following are some issues related to QoS that need to be addressed in order to have smooth migration from the current mobile systems to 4G mobile networks: Some standards need special measurement equipments. It makes very difficult for normal users to verify the parameters of their Service Level Agreements. Mappings between different standards and specifications (ITU, ETSI, UMTS, IETF, WiMAX, WiFi, cdma2000, etc) are not clear. Mapping between Telecom standards and IP standards is not clear. The 3GPP specifications have addressed this at very high level by defining a PDF element and the need for coordination; however the specific mechanisms have not been addressed. Target values and thresholds for End-to-End QoS parameters shall be defined in clear way. These values should be simple enough for the end-user to measure and manage. Applications, that are currently exist, in the service provider domain (the Internet) may need some modifications to communicate with the PDF element and other QoS mechanisms of different Access Service Networks. Mobility, through routing, link error rate, available bandwidth and throughput, service and user location, security, handoff, may add other complications to QoS management and measurements and need to addressed among the different Access Service Networks as well as the Connectivitys Networks and IP based networks. Roaming agreements between Access Service Networks (ASN) providers, Connectivity Service Network (CSN) providers and external backbone providers should consider the promised QoS of the end-users. QoS measurements and analysis should be measured in real and simulated networks based on different standards and proposals in order to better define the QoS architecture, attributes, parameters and mainly the target values. VI. CONCLUSIONS Though there exist different architectures and mechanisms that have been proposed to support QoS in heterogeneous networks, there are a number of issues that need further studies for smooth migration from the current mobile systems to 4G mobile networks. Among these issues is the mapping between different standards, mobility, routing, and handover between different access service networks and connectivity networks.

2011 ACEEE DOI: 02.ACT.2011.03.75

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