The focus of this book is on mechanisms that affect the VoIP user satisfaction while not explicitly involved in the media session. The book thus investigates and proposes cross-layer techniques for realizing time-efficient control mechanisms for VoIP.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 6th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness and of the Third International ICST Workshop on Advanced Architectures and Algorithms for Internet DElivery and Applications. Both events were held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in November 2009. To each of these events is devoted a specific part of the volume. The first part is dedicated to the proceedings of ICST QShine 2009. The first four chapters deal with new issues concerning the quality of service in IP-based telephony and multimedia. A second set of four chapters addresses some important research problems in mul- hop wireless networks, with a special emphasis on the problems of routing. The following three papers deal with recent advances in the field of data mana- ment and area coverage in sensor networks, while a fourth set of chapters deals with mobility and context-aware services. The fifth set of chapters contains new works in the area of Internet delivery and switching systems. The following chapters of the QShine part of the volume are devoted to papers in the areas of resource management in wireless networks, overlay, P2P and SOA arc- tectures. Some works also deal with the optimization of quality of service and energy consumption in WLAN and sensor networks and on the design of a mobility support in mesh networks.

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in deployment and usage of realtime network applications, such as Voice-over-IP, video calls/video conferencing, live net- work seminars, and networked gaming. The continued increase in the popularity of realtime applications requires a more intense focus on the provision of strict guarantees for Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as delay, jitter and packet loss in access networks. At the same time, wireless networking technologies have become increasingly popular with a wide array of devices such as laptop computers, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and cellular phones being sold with built-in WiFi and WiMAX interfaces. For realtime applications to be popular over wireless networks, simple, robust and e ective QoS mechanisms suited for a variety of heterogeneous wireless networks must be devised. Implementing the same QoS mechanisms across multiple neighbouring networks aids seamless handover by ensuring that a flow will be treated in the same way, both before and after handover.

The importance of quality of service (QoS) has risen with the recent evolution of telecommunication networks, which are characterised by a great heterogeneity. While many applications require a specific level of assurance from the network; communication networks are characterized by different service providers, transmission means and implementer solutions such as asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4), IPv6 and MPLS. Providing comprehensive coverage of QoS issues within heterogeneous network environments, “QoS Over Heterogeneous Networks” looks to find solutions to questions such as does QoS fit within heterogeneous networks and what is the impact on performance if information traverses different network portions that implement specific QoS schemes. Includes: A series of algorithms and protocols to help solve potential QoS problems. State of the art case studies and operative examples to illustrate points made. Information on QoS mapping in terms of service-level specification (SLS) and an in-depth discussion of related issues Chapters end-to-end (E2E) QoS, QoS architecture, QoS over heterogeneous networks and QoS internetworking and mapping. An ideal book for graduate students, researchers and lecturers. System designers, developers and engineers will also find “QoS Over Heterogeneous Networks” a valuable reference.

Presents a solid analytical framework for traffic analysis in wireless IP networks and provides valuable analytical tools for network planning, dimensioning, and optimization for wireless IP networks in a multiple classes environment.

An ideal starting point for anyone wanting to learn about next generation wireless networks Gives important insights into the design of wireless IP networks Illustrates the standards and network architectures defined by leading standards bodies (including MWIF, 3GPP and 3GPP2) Discusses protocols in four key areas: signaling, mobility, quality of service, and security The authors have a good deal of experience in this field, and have many patents pending in the area of wireless networking

A modern communication network can be described as a large, complex, distributed system composed by higher interoperating, smaller sub-systems. Today, the proliferation and convergence of different types of wired, wireless, and mobile networks are crucial for the success of the next generation networking. However, these networks can hardly meet the requirements of future integrated-service networks, and are expected to carry multimedia traffic with various Quality of Experience (QoE) and Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. Providing all relevant QoS/QoE issues in these heterogeneous networks is then an important challenge for telecommunication operators, manufacturers, and companies. The impressive emergence and the important demand of the rising generation of real-time Multi-service (such as Data, Voice VoD, Video-Conference, etc.) over communication heterogeneous networks, require scalability while considering a continuous QoS. This book presents and explains all the techniques in new generation networks which integrate efficient global control mechanisms in two directions: (1) maintain QoS requirements in order to maximize network resources utilization, and minimize operational costs on all the types of wired-wireless-mobile networks used to transport traffic, and (2) mix the QoS associated with home, access, and core networks in order to provide Quality of Service/Quality of Experience expected by users of new services.

Wireless networks provide flexible and ubiquitous access to the telephone networks or the Internet. Multiple technologies have been developed to provide wireless access including cellular/3G/LTE, WiFi, and WiMAX. The cellular network is the most popular network, which provides the stable and constant service under most types of mobility. Its future version, LTE Advanced, is the most advanced wireless access technology, and supports the current or future bandwidth-sensitive and/or delay-sensitive applications, such as Voice over IP and real-time video streaming. The WiFi network has been aggressively deployed in many areas and provide access to laptops, PDAs and smartphones. These are referred to as WiFi hotspots. The basic WiFi infrastructure usually offers flexible and easy to deploy wireless access inside a small area at a low cost. The WiMAX network has its own advantages to provide higher transmission speed for a point-to-point communication over longer transmission distances. In many areas, these wireless networks co-exist, overlap and interlace with one another to create a heterogeneous wireless network. Instead of functioning independently, significant benefits can be accrued through cooperation and coordination among these networks by leveraging their unique advantages. This is possible as user devices come with multiple network interfaces to connect to each of these networks. In order to exploit the advantages of these heterogeneous networks, it is important to implement an efficient resource allocation algorithm to coordinate the resources of multiple wireless networks and also have a good design of the heterogeneous network. The dissertation makes contributions in both the above areas. In current WiFi networks, the overall spectrum is divided among multiple overlapping channels. The adjacent access points need to operate on orthogonal channels to avoid the interference. In Chapter II, we give a precise analysis of the interference among different channels and discuss the potential possibility of utilizing partially overlapping channels in the multi-hop mesh networks. It is possible to optimize different network performance metric, such as throughput, by balancing parallel transmissions and partially received transmission power offers the best system performance, such as throughput. In the multi-hop mesh networks, some mesh nodes are highly congested either due to the interferences from multiple neighbors, or when they are located at the intersection of multiple routing paths. These highly congested mesh nodes significantly degrade the network performance, since the throughput of a path is limited by the node with minimum capacity. In Chapter III, we discuss the efficient cooperation between a WiFi-based mesh network and a WiMAX network to mitigate the impact of congested nodes. The WiMAX network, with its longer transmission range, can be leveraged to bypass the traffic from some highly congested mesh nodes. The load balancing makes the throughput of the heterogeneous network higher than the sum of the throughput from the WiFi and WiMAX networks if they operate independently. In the widely deployed wireless networks, the infrastructure mode is used, where customer devices only communicate with the base stations. This mode is suitable for normal Internet access. However, some emerging applications, such as P2P file sharing, teleconferencing, network games, require frequent communications among terminals that may be in the coverage of the same base station. The exiting infrastructure mode of the network architecture results in high resource waste due to the unnecessary transmissions via the base station even when both the user could directly communicate. In Chapter IV, we propose a novel network architecture, Local-Interest-Group (LIG), in which all nodes can communicate in any ways according to the application requirements. The real-time algorithm and protocol minimize the interferences among co-existing LIGs and maximize the bandwidth utilization, which greatly improves the overall system performance under multiple performance metrics. In network planning, it is difficult to efficiently locate base stations due to the inaccuracies in the prediction of the traffic density. The movement of traffic to different parts in the city during different times of a day makes fixed base stations either operate at very low load or become highly congested at different time periods. Fortunately, the detailed analysis based on network measurement shows that the movement of traffic density is predicable. In Chapter V, we propose a new network component, Traffic-Tracing Gateway (TTG), which works as the base station but traces the traffic movement taking the advantage of the heterogeneous wireless networks. By following the optimal trajectories, TTGs cover the maximum traffic and provide much better system performance in both single-hop or multi-hop networks. This dissertation proposes efficient resource allocation methods in heterogenous wireless access network with partially overlapping channels and the cooperation between WiFi and WiMAX networks. In the dissertation, we also propose the novel network designs based on local-interest-groups and traffic-tracing gateways, to augment existing wireless access networks and making them more resource efficient while providing higher end-to-end performance.