Performance measurements for symmetrical services in wireless networks

Symmetrical services are multimedia applications such as voice over Internet Protocol, video conferencing and other applications that require both uplink and downlink connectivity. Both uplink and downlink must be considered simultaneously to evaluate the performances. Conventional metrics such as throughput, delay and packet loss can only measure the performances in a single direction, thus it may not be suitable to illustrate the performances from symmetrical perspectives. Using complex number and graph theory, we present a formula that can measure uplink and downlink performances simultaneously. Substituting conventional metrics in this formula presents new symmetrical metrics. Furthermore, the formula provides the advantage of converting symmetrical metrics to conventional metrics as well. This gives us the flexibility to use symmetrical or conventional metrics. At the end of this paper, we present a range of simulation experiments in orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based wireless network to investigate different resource allocation schemes. The results of the proposed metrics show that we can analyze and observe the performances more efficiently as compared to using conventional metrics.