An optimal bandwidth allocation and data droppage scheme for differentiated services in a wireless network

We present an optimal proportional bandwidth allocation and data droppage scheme to provide differentiated services (DiffServ) for streaming multimedia data in a single-hop wireless network. Our resource allocation scheme finds the optimal bandwidth allocation and data drop rates under minimum quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. It combines the desirable attributes of relative DiffServ and absolute DiffServ approaches. In contrast to relative DiffServ approach, our scheme guarantees the minimum amount of bandwidth provided to each user without dropping any data at the base-station, when the network has sufficient resources. If the network does not have sufficient resources to provide minimum bandwidth guarantees without data droppage to all users, the proportional data dropper finds the optimal data drop rates within acceptable levels of QoS and thus avoids the inflexibility of absolute DiffServ approach. We formulate the optimal bandwidth allocation and data droppage as constrained non-linear optimization problems and solve these using efficient techniques. We demonstrate through simulations that our scheme exhibits the desirable features of the absolute and relative DiffServ approaches.