An agent-based metric for quality of services over wireless networks

Abstract

In a wireless LAN environment, clients tend to associate with the nearest access point (AP) which usually provides the strongest signal. However, this does not guarantee that users will receive the best quality of service (QoS) if the population sharing the network capacity were not considered. In other words, within the same access point, the more the population is, the less bandwidth each user will share, and the worse the quality of service will be. In this paper, we proposed an anticipative agent assistance (AAA) which is an agent-based metric for evaluating and managing the resource information of the wireless access points, computing the potential AP list, and providing clients with resource information of APs. We also propose a novel QoS feedback mechanism which allows users to promptly adjust the service quality with AAA according to the throughput and delay requirements. We evaluate the performance of our proposed method using the ns-2 simulator. Numerical results show that AAA achieves: (1) reduce the transmission delay, (2) increase the throughput, (3) improve the network utilization, (4) accommodate more users to access the networks, and (5) achieve load-balancing. Our metric is implementation feasible in various IEEE WLAN environments. (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Inc.