Quality of service models for heterogeneous networks: Overview and challenges

The proliferation and convergence of different types of wired, wireless and mobile networks (such as WiMAX, Wireless Mesh Networks, WPANs, WLANs, etc) and cellular-based networks are crucial for the success of next-generation networks. Traditional wired/wireless networks can hardly meet the requirements of future integrated-service networks which are expected to carry multimedia traffic with various quality of service (QoS) requirements. Therefore, it is necessary to develop efficient global control mechanisms that can maintain QoS requirements to maximize network resources utilization, and minimize operational costs on all the types of wireless mobile networks. In this paper, we present an overview of QoS paradigms for heterogeneous networks and focus on those based on deterministic and probabilistic QoS.