H3M - A Rapidly Deployable Architecture with QoS Provisioning for Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks will have to be based on highly mobile systems that are self-organizing, rapidly deployable, heterogeneous, and will not rely on expensive infrastructure. Since these networks will be called upon to support real-time interactive multimedia traffic, they must be able to provide their users with adequate quality of service (QoS) guarantees. In addition, we want to consider networks with highly dynamic resource requirements, such as QoS, by multiple,dynamically changing groups. The architecture and protocol is based upon a protocol called DRAMA.[4-8]. We have taken the kernel of DRAMA - operating CSMA/CD in a metropolitan area and multichannel load balancing ^O and created a new architecture suitable to a highly mobile environment. We refer to it as the Hierarchical Heterogeneous Highly Mobile network (H 3 M, for short). As the name short). As the name suggests, the H 3 M network consists of a hierarchy of heterogeneous hosts distributed over a geographical area and linked together in a wireless communication system. At the bottom level of the hierarchy we have a cluster architecture whose connectivity and management activities are assumed by a mobile base station (MBS). In turn, the MBSs are organized into a virtual network, essentially emulating a local area network like structure. The protocol for arbitrating as to who sends what on what frequency at what time is based on a combination of TDMA and CSMA/CD frames and frequency allocations to a cluster of nodes that allows for dynamic bandwidth allocation and which supports multicasting. Simulation and analysis have shown that H 3 M is robust, scales well and provides much higher throughput than other protocols, while supporting the same degree of host mobility. Importantly, H 3 M turns out to be well suited for handling on-demand multimedia communications in a heterogeneous, highly mobile environment. Multicasting is supported with minimal overhead.