CAPACITY ALLOCATION FOR TELEMETRY LINKS WITH VARIABLE TRANSMISSION RATES

Abstract

Current IP-based telemetry systems such as iNET perform capacity allocation among multiple radios under the assumption of uniform link rates. This assumption breaks down when adaptive modulation is deployed to vary link rates in response to channel degradation. In particular, many modern radios can increase their transmission rate through adaptive coding. To take advantage of these increased rates, we designed several iNET Link Manager (LM) bandwidth allocation algorithms for the future iNET that implements adaptive coding techniques. These new LM algorithms include both weight-based schemes in which link bandwidth is allocated based on the priority assigned to the links and queues, as well as a greedy algorithm in which link bandwidth is allocated strictly based on link rates. We evaluated the effectiveness of these algorithms using both analytical analysis and test-bed experimentation. Through a rich set of test-cases, we conclude that a weight-based algorithm in which link priority is assigned using the product of link weight and link data rate has the best performance, and hence can be considered for the future iNET LM.