Call admission control in wireless multimedia networks

Abstract

This paper addresses the call admission control problem for the multimedia services that characterize the third generation of wireless networks. In the proposed model each cell has to serve a variety of classes of requests that differ in their traffic parameters, bandwidth requirements and in the priorities while ensuring proper quality of service levels to all of them. A semi Markov process is used to model multi-class multimedia systems with heterogeneous traffic behavior, allowing for call transitions among classes. It is shown that the derived optimal policy establishes state-related threshold values for the admission policy of handoff and new calls in the different classes, while minimizing the blocking probabilities of all the classes and prioritizing the handoff requests. It is proven that in restrictive cases the optimal policy has the shape of a multi-threshold priority policy, while in general situations the optimal policy has a more complex shape.