Performance Evaluation of Multi-Radio Transmission Diversity: QoS Support for Delay Sensitive Services

Integration and seamless networking of different wireless technologies is one of the driving scenarios in the contemporary research. In recent years, mobile phones have seen an influx of attractive on-demand multimedia services with strict QoS requirements. This work investigates the QoS for delay sensitive services under the design framework of a heterogeneous network. Multi Radio Transmission Diversity (MRTD), which exploits the benefits of dynamic usage of different access technologies, is tested using simulations for Voice-over-IP on multi-radio wireless devices. The network technologies in this study include HSDPA on UMTS and IEEE 802.11. By applying various MRTD schemes, gains in performance have been observed in terms of average packet delay, packet loss and goodput as compared to a legacy system which operates under only one network access for a given session. The MRTD schemes have been analyzed for various simulation scenarios characterized by varying traffic load and radio propagation conditions.