Resource allocation for cellular data services using multiagent schemes

Because the radio spectrum is limited, managing the limited amount of resources is an important issue, especially for high-speed data applications. This paper presents a distributed multiagent scheme (DMAS) that was developed for supporting resource allocations in a customer-accepted and cost-effective fashion. The scheme consists of a collection of problem-solving agents with three modules: the knowledge source, the blackboard system, and the control engine built into the scheme. Through operations and cooperation among the active agents, an allocation policy is selected and a customer-accepted schedule that meets the specified quality of service (QoS) is generated. A comparison of the performance between the DMAS scheme and other references previously proposed was derived using a 55 microcell model. It was found that the proposed scheme gave the highest quality of service satisfaction (around 90% at light loading and 60% at heavy loading).