Stochastic Admission Control for Quality of Service in Wireless Packet Networks

Abstract

Call admission control is a key element for providing quality of service (QoS) in mobile wireless networks. Traditional admission control schemes only address call-level QoS guarantee because of the underlying circuit-based network architecture. In contrast, emerging wireless technologies such as 3G and 4G tend to be packet-switched rather than circuit-switched because the packet-based architecture allows better sharing of the scarce wireless resources. This paper introduces a novel distributed call admission control scheme called PFG, which maximizes the wireless channel utilization subject to a predetermined bound on the call dropping and packet loss probabilities for variable-bit-rate traffic in a packet-switched wireless cellular network. In particular, we show that in wireless packet networks, the undesired event of dropping an ongoing call can be completely eliminated without sacrificing the bandwidth utilization. Extensive simulation results show that our scheme satisfies the hard constraint on call dropping and packet loss probabilities while maintaining a high bandwidth utilization.