Prioritized multi-class adaptive framework for multimedia wireless networks

Abstract

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