QoS provisioning in heterogeneous networks: A perspective from the edge

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The Internet is a revolutionary technology that changes our life dramatically. Both business and individuals have benefited much from various Internet applications, including email, www, etc. The Internet has evolved dramatically over the past decades. Nowadays, it is moving forward in several aspects. In terms of Internet applications, more and more time-sensitive applications are emerging. For example, Internet telephony and video conferencing have been widely used. Many newer applications, such as online interactive television, are stepping into our life gradually but firmly. For these applications, Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms that guarantee a certain level of performance to data flows are required. In terms of access technology, although wired access is still very popular, more and more Internet users are adopting wireless technologies, such as WiFi (i.e. IEEE 802.11 networks). As a result, the Internet is becoming a heterogeneous network that is composed of wired core networks and wired/wireless access networks. Over the past years, the bandwidth of WiFi networks has increased significantly. However, the bandwidth commonly offered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) has not matched up with the increase. In addition, the uplink bandwidth offered by ISPs is often much lower than the downlink rate. As a result, when multiple Internet users access the Internet via a WiFi network, the connection from the WiFi network to the ISP tends to be the bottleneck. In this case, if QoS provisioning is not in place, time-sensitive applications, such as VoIP, will suffer seriously from the bottleneck. In this project, we plan to explore QoS provisioning in the heterogeneous Internet when WiFi is used as the access technology. Specifically, we focus on the scenarios in which the connection from the WiFi network to the ISP is congested. We attempt to provide a solution to the QoS problem from the perspective of the edge. Our vision is that cross-layer QoS provisioning mechanisms will solve the QoS problem efficiently.