On Flow Management for Future Multi-Hop Mobile Radio Networks

Next generation mobile radio networks of IMT Advanced systems family will offer ubiquitous broadband high area coverage, at up to 1 GBit/s in cities and 100 MBit/s in rural areas and QoS support in terms of throughput and low delay. Candidate technologies like 3GPP-LTE, WiMAX, as well as the WINNER system design are based on OFDMA transmission for flexible radio resource allocation, scalable and adaptable to both short range and wide area scenarios. Multi-hop relaying is part of all system concepts, in order to cover huge radio cell areas with a reduced number of base stations. Moreover, no future mobile radio system can afford to neglect supporting the increasing QoS demand of multimedis services, like high quality video streaming or VoIP. These services may have different QoS needs. So, mechanisms have to be provided by future mobile radio systems to distinguish packets of different applications. Therefore this paper introduces a flow management concept for multi-hop mobile radio systems as enabler for QoS aware resource scheduling. Mechanisms supporting the cross-layer signalling of QoS requirements by the Application Layer to the Data Link Layer are described. In the Layer 2 the resource scheduler can make use of this information to distinguish packets belonging to different application sessions.