An average degradation degree and ratio based rate adaptation algorithm for wireless mobile networks

This work considers the problem of bandwidth adaptation in wireless mobile environment. In network in which the bandwidth resource changes frequently and an hard quality of service can not be guaranteed, is important to consider an adaptive approach in the bandwidth management. This work proposes new bandwidth adaptation algorithm called average degradation degree and ratio based rate adaptation. This algorithm accounts for the degradation degree and the degradation ratio of the flows as criteria to manage the bandwidth. In the literature many rate adaptation algorithms consider the fairness criteria and the protocol overhead but there is no scheme that accounts for the flow degradation degree maintaining good fairness properties. We compare the proposed algorithm with well known studied schemes: minimum adaptation, fair rate adaptation and average rate adaptation algorithm. The performances of the wireless systems have been evaluated in terms of overhead, fairness, and degradation degree and degradation ratio. Performance measurements show that the proposed algorithm is able to reduce the degradation degree and degradation ratio preserving good fairness properties without adding significative overhead.