Support of Real-Time Services over Integrated 802.16 Metropolitan and Local Area Networks

The growing demand of high bandwidth services and applications, and the increasing will of access to these services anywhere, is motivating the requirement to integrate the current Internet with the mobile networks. However, there will always be remote areas where Internet access will be difficult to achieve. The IEEE 802.16 is an attractive broadband wireless technology for these scenarios, non-withstanding its limitations for dynamic environments. This paper discusses a network architecture able to support real time services using 802.16 networks as a backhaul. We present the modules required to provide an integrated QoS approach over the 802.16 network, and address main implementation results in terms of QoS performance, and in terms of mobility with QoS support for converged networks comprising WiMax and WiFi technologies. We show that our architecture is able to provide end-to-end QoS over the concatenation of metro and local area networks, and that seamless mobility is achieved with high performance measures, thus being able to support real-time services.