Active queue management for wireless communication network uplink

Abstract

According to the teachings presented herein, a base station implements active queue management (AQM) for uplink transmissions from user equipment (UE), such as a mobile terminal. The base station, e.g., an eNodeB in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, uses buffer status reports, for example, to estimate packet delays for packets in the UE's uplink transmit buffer. In one embodiment, a (base station) method of AQM for the uplink includes estimating at least one of a transmit buffer size and a transmit buffer queuing delay for a UE, and selectively dropping or congestion-marking packets received at the base station from the UE. The selective dropping or marking is based on the estimated transmit buffer size and / or the estimated transmit buffer queuing delay.

Description

technical field [0001] The present invention relates generally to wireless communication networks, and more particularly to active queue management (AQM) in such networks. Background technique [0002] LTE is a new radio access network technology that evolved from 3G WCDMA and provides high peak bit rate and high-end QoS. However, the wireless link can still be the bottleneck of the end-to-end connection in many cases. In an overload situation, that is, a situation where the data rate entering the link is greater than the outgoing rate, too much data is temporarily stored in the memory. This memory is often referred to as the transmit buffer or queue. If the overload continues, the data queue will accumulate and grow large. This can cause many problems, such as large end-to-end delays, unfair sharing between different flows, etc. [0003] Also, because the buffer is finite, the queue may eventually exceed the physical limit and some data will have to be discarded. The s...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

However, as noted, this proposal was not accepted in 3GPP for LTE Release 8

It will be possible to specify a UE-based uplink AQM mechanism for LTE in Release 9 (or subsequent releases) to achieve better performance, but standardization work will be required and the mechanism will not be available for Release 8 UEs

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