Investigation of the QoS Provision Potentials of the Exploitation of Infrastructure-less Segments by Composite Wireless Infrastructures
Kostas Tsagkaris, Mario Logothetis and Panagiotis Demestichas
Due to the need for supporting diversified applications with vastly expanded use of wireless access, the Future Internet (FI) will set the networks under stress for resources. This motivates the quest for Quality of Service (QoS), through technologies that achieve higher utilization of resources and lower transmission powers and energy consumption. The goal of this paper is to present and validate a solution that achieves these targets, and thus, creates important value-adding opportunities for both the user and the wireless industry. The proposed solution considers the possibility of extending the infrastructure-based Composite Wireless Network (CWN), which is owned by a wireless operator and consists of a set of radio access networks, by network elements and devices that are organized in an infrastructure-less manner. The decision of the CWN to create or not such an infrastructure-less network will be dynamic, should respect traffic, energy and mobility aspects and should also envisage anticipated QoS related benefits for the whole network. Framed within this statement, this paper aims at recommending whether and when the creation of such an infrastructure-less network(s) will be beneficiary for the overall network as an extension to a CWN. For that reason, extensive simulations were conducted so as to cover a large gamut of test cases, thus increasing the validity of the extracted recommendations. Simulation results reveal that there exist specific suitability criteria under which the creation of infrastructure-less networks can be recommended.
Keywords: Future internet, composite wireless networks, infrastructure extensions, infrastructure-less segments, management functionality, suitability determination, network simulators