Dynamic Buffer Management for Multimedia Services in 3.5 G Wireless Networks

This paper presents and investigates a dynamic buffer management scheme for QoS control of multimedia services in a 3.5 G wireless system ie 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.