Dynamic Buffer Management for Multimedia Services in 3.5G Wireless Networks

This paper presents and investigates a dynamic
buffer management scheme for QoS control of multimedia
services in a 3.5G wireless system i.e. the High Speed Downlink
Packet Access (HSDPA). HSDPA was introduced to enhance
UMTS for high-speed packet switched services. With HSDPA,
packet scheduling and HARQ mechanisms in the base station
require data buffering at the air interface thus introducing a
potential bottleneck to end-to-end communication. Hence, for
multimedia services with multiplexed parallel diverse flows
such as video and data in the same end-user session, buffer
management schemes in the base station are essential to support
end-to-end QoS provision. We propose a dynamic buffer management
scheme for HSDPA multimedia sessions with aggregated real-time and non real-time flows in the paper. The end-to-end performance impact of the scheme is evaluated with an example multimedia session comprising a real-time streaming
flow concurrent with TCP-based non real-time flow via extensive HSDPA simulations. Results demonstrate that the scheme can guarantee the end-to-end QoS of the real-time streaming flow, whilst simultaneously protecting non real-time flow from starvation resulting in improved end-to-end throughput performance