QoS provisioning in heterogeneous networks: A perspective from the edge

互联网是一项革命性的技术，极大地改变了我们的生活。企业和个人都从各种互联网应用中受益良多，包括电子邮件、WWW等。互联网在过去几十年中发生了戏剧性的发展。如今，它在几个方面正在向前发展。在互联网应用方面，越来越多的时间敏感型应用正在涌现。例如，互联网电话和视频会议已被广泛使用。许多较新的应用，如在线互动电视，正在逐渐但坚定地走进我们的生活。对于这些应用，需要能够保证数据流达到一定性能水平的服务质量(Qos)机制。在接入技术方面，虽然有线接入仍然非常流行，但越来越多的互联网用户正在采用无线技术，如WIFI(即IEEE 802.11网络)。因此，互联网正在成为一个由有线核心网和有线/无线接入网络组成的异质网络。在过去的几年里，WiFi网络的带宽大幅增加。然而，互联网服务提供商通常提供的带宽却跟不上增长的速度。此外，运营商提供的上行带宽往往比下行速率低得多。因此，当多个互联网用户通过WiFi网络访问互联网时，从WiFi网络到ISP的连接往往是瓶颈。在这种情况下，如果不提供服务质量，时间敏感型应用程序(如VoIP)将严重受到瓶颈的影响。在这个项目中，我们计划探索在使用WiFi作为接入技术时，在异质互联网中提供服务质量的问题。具体而言，我们将重点介绍从WiFi网络到互联网服务提供商的连接拥塞的场景。我们试图从边缘的角度为服务质量问题提供解决方案。我们的愿景是，跨层的服务质量保障机制将有效地解决服务质量问题。

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.