A unified bandwidth reservation and admission control mechanism for QoS provisioning in cellular networks

We propose a unified framework consisting of a differential bandwidth reservation (DBR) algorithm and a Quality of Service (QoS)-aware admission control scheme to provide QoS guarantees to on-going connections in cellular networks. The differential bandwidth reservation policy uses a sector of cells in making the bandwidth reservation for accepting a new call. Based on the distance of the target cells in the sectors, two different bandwidth reservation policies are applied to optimize the connection dropping rate (CDR), while maintaining a competitive connection blocking rate (CBR). In addition, two possible mobile terminal (MT) movements are analyzed using the DBR mechanism. In the first case, no knowledge of an MT’s moving path is assumed to be known, while in the second case, prior knowledge of an user profile is used in bandwidth reservation, and it is called user profile-based DBR (UPDBR) algorithm. Using the DBR scheme, we propose an admission control algorithm that uses varying number of cells in a sector to meet admission decisions. Extensive simulation is performed to evaluate our methodology. Comparison of the proposed scheme with two prior schemes shows that our approach is not only capable of providing better QoS guarantees, but is also flexible in terms of using varying number of cells in satisfying the high-level QoS requirements. Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.