Abstract
Emerging access networks will use heterogeneous wireless technologies such as 802.11, 802.16 or UMTS, to offer users the best access to the Internet. Layer 2 access networks will consist of wireless bridges (access points) that isolate, concatenated, or in mesh provide access to mobile nodes. The transport of real time traffic over these networks may demand new QoS signalling, used to reserve resources. Besides the reservation, the new signalling needs to address the dynamics of the wireless links, the mobility of the terminals, and the multicast traffic.
In this paper a new protocol is proposed aimed at solving this problem-the QoS Abstraction Layer (QoSAL). Existing only at the control plane, the QoSAL is located above the layer 2 and hides from layer 3 the details of each technology with respect to the QoS and to the network topology. The QoSAL has been designed, simulated, and tested. The results obtained demonstrate its usefulness in 4G networks.