Effective capacity-based quality of service measures for wireless networks

An important objective of next-generation wireless networks is to provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees. This requires a simple and efficient wireless channel model that can easily translate into connection-level QoS measures such as data rate, delay and delay-violation probability. To achieve this, in Wu and Negi (IEEE Trans. on Wireless Communications 2(4) (2003) 630-643), we developed a link-layer channel model termed effective capacity, for the setting of a single hop, constant-bit-rate arrivals, fluid traffic, and wireless channels with negligible propagation delay. In this paper, we apply the effective capacity technique to deriving QoS measures for more general situations, namely, (1) networks with multiple wireless links, (2) variable-bit-rate sources, (3) packetized traffic, and (4) wireless channels with non-negligible propagation delay.