Supporting delay guarantees over unreliable wireless channels

Many emerging applications of networks require delay guarantees for packet deliveries. It is particularly challenging to provide services for these applications over wireless channels, since wireless transmissions are usually unreliable. In this dissertation, we provide a theory that formulates and addresses the problem of serving flows with delay guarantees over unreliable wireless channels. The core of this theory is an analytical model that jointly considers several practical aspects of flows with delay guarantees: traffic patterns, per-packet delay bounds, throughput requirements, and channel reliabilities. The model can also address fading channels and the usage of rate adaptation. Based on this model, we obtain solutions for three important mechanisms: admission control, packet scheduling, and utility maximization. In addition, we address the scenario of broadcasting flows with delay constraints and incorporate various network coding mechanisms. We also extend models used in the real-time system literature and discuss the scheduling problem for a multimedia server