A Common Representation of QoS Levels for Resource Allocation in Hybrid Satellite/Terrestrial Networks

Abstract

The future hybrid satellite/terrestrial networks are challenged to provide different end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) classes to the users. In particular, it is expected that QoS routing procedures are implemented, in order to decides the best route to the destination and optimize resource distribution through the path. This fact arises the question of a common representation of the QoS levels such that they can be compared and combined. It was shown in the literature how they can be mapped into a single parameter, the so-called virtual delay. We present and investigate the computational complexity of two approaches to distribute the virtual delay over the communication path (i.e., allocating the resources) in order to guarantee a QoS performance requested by the user minimizing the cost of the provided service. The former consists of a joint routing/resource allocation optimization. The latter assumes that the selection of the path is correctly performed and models the resource allocation problem as an equality constrained convex minimization problem.