Dynamic Handoff Priority Adjustment Based on Mobility-Awareness in Multimedia Cellular Networks

In multimedia cellular networks, when a Mobile Host requests multimedia services, it may experience handoffs to several cells before the request is completely served. If a target cell cannot provide adequate bandwidth for a service request, instead of directly dropping the request, the MH is put into the handoff queue and hopefully the requested bandwidth can be satisfied by later released bandwidth. Obviously, it is important to properly assign priorities for queued handoff of MHs based on their inborn dynamics to avoid unnecessary dropping. In this paper, we present a dynamic handoff priority adjustment scheme which applied a handoff queuing scheme to dynamically adjust handoff priority based on receiving signal strength, service class, and mobility of Mobile Hosts. In addition, idle bandwidth reserved by inactive MHs is reallocated to urgent handoff MHs to reduce the call dropping probability. The goal of the proposed dynamic handoff priority adjustment scheme is to further reduce call dropping probability while still maintaining high bandwidth utilization and acceptable call blocking probability on multimedia cellular networks.