Adaptive bandwidth framework for provisioning connection-level QoS for next-generation wireless cellular networks

Abstract

The next generation of wireless cellular networks is expected to support real-time multimedia services with different classes of traffic and diverse bandwidth requirements. Bandwidth is a scarce resource in wireless networking that needs to be carefully allocated amid competing connections with different quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, an adaptive framework for supporting multiple classes of multimedia services with different QoS requirements in wireless cellular networks is proposed. The framework combines the following components: (1) a threshold-based bandwidth allocation policy that gives priority to handoff calls over new calls and prioritizes among different classes of handoff calls by assigning a threshold to each class; (2) an efficient threshold-type call admission control (CAC) algorithm; and (3) a bandwidth adaptation algorithm (BAA) that dynamically adjusts the bandwidth of ongoing multimedia calls to minimize the number of calls receiving lower bandwidth than they had requested. Numerical results show that the proposed adaptive multimedia framework outperforms existing non-adaptive schemes in terms of the handoff call dropping probability and effective utilization.