A Proposal for Service Differentiation by a Link Layer Protocol Based on SR ARQ and Its Evaluation

This paper studies the situation where multiple IP flows are aggregated over a single wireless channel and an error recovery by retransmissions is performed by Selective-Repeat (SR) ARQ. We propose MQ-PFRS (Multi-QoS Per-Flow Resequencing) ARQ that provides a differentiated service for an IP flow depending on its QoS class, such as real-time or non-real-time. MQ-PFRS ARQ eliminates interferences among IP flows by resequencing received packets independently for each IP flow. It also controls the maximum packet delay by limiting the persistency of retransmissions and the maximum resequencing time for each packet. This paper also presents an analysis of the probability distribution of real-time packet delays. Simulation results show that the delay variation of real-time traffic is effectively controlled by proposed MQ-PFRS ARQ and the packet delay distribution is quite consistent with the results of the analysis. This means that MQ-PFRS is effective for handling multiple QoS classes of IP flows and the quality of real-time traffic transferred by the scheme can be predicted by the analysis.