Optimal Call Admission Control for Voice Traffic in Cellular Mobile Communication Networks

Abstract

We propose a new call admission control (CAC) scheme for voice calls in cellular mobile communication networks. It is assumed that the rejection of a hand-off call is less desirable than that of a new call, for a hand-off call loss would cause a severe mental pain to a user. We consider the pains of rejecting new and hand-off calls as different costs. The key idea of our CAC is to restrict the admission of new calls in order to minimize the total expected costs per unit time over the long term. An optimal policy is derived from a semi-Markov decision process in which the intervals between successive decision epochs are exponentially distributed. Based on this optimal policy, we calculate the steady state probability for the number of established voice connections in a cell. We then evaluate the probability of blocking new calls and the probability of forced termination of hand-off calls. In the numerical experiments, it is found that the forced termination probability of hand-off calls is reduced significantly by our CAC scheme at the slight expense of the blocking probability of new calls and the channel utilization. Comparison with the static guard channel scheme is made.