The University of British Columbia

In this paper, we propose to adapt the early regulation of unresponsive flows (ERUF) to third generation wireless networks employing link layer retransmissions. Wireless channel degradations may result in backlog of downlink packets at the link layer queue, causing real-time packets with hard delivery deadlines to expire and be dropped at the receiver. We propose to regulate these congested flows by dropping expiring packets at the ingress edge node of the general packet radio service (GPRS)/universal mobile telecommunication services (UMTS) core network to release shared network resources for other flows. Based on an analysis of the characteristics of the radio link control (RLC) layer of the GPRS/UMTS network, we develop a new set of mechanisms based on active queue management to achieve this goal. We present simulation results to show that this new wireless early regulation of unresponsive flows (WERUF) scheme can significantly improve the overall end-to-end quality-of-service of all traffic flows.