Providing service differentiation in wireless networks

Differentiated services (Diffserv) model is one of the possible solutions for providing quality of service (QoS) on the Internet. Most existing approaches assume that the packet loss is an indication of network congestion and thus reduce the sending rates of sources. For wireless networks, the assumption is not proper since packet losses may be caused by other reasons, such as fading and interference of the signal. Therefore, these approaches do not work well in wireless networks. In this paper, we propose an approach which is able to provide service differentiation in wireless environments. In our approach, the rate share of a connection is determined by the associated weight. By keeping a proper amount of extra data in the network, the proposed approach can achieve weighted proportional fairness, which can provide selective QoS without any particular support from the network. We use the ns simulator to evaluate our approach. Simulation results show the validity of the proposed approach.