Adaptive bandwidth reservation and admission control in QoS-sensitive cellular networks

How to keep the probability of hand-off drops within a prespecified limit is a very important Quality-of-Service (QoS) issue in cellular networks because mobile users should be able to maintain ongoing sessions even during their hand-off from one cell to another. In order to keep the hand-off dropping probability below a prespecified target value (thus providing a probabilistic QoS guarantee), we design and evaluate predictive and adaptive schemes for bandwidth reservation for the hand-offs of ongoing sessions and the admission control of new connections. We first develop a method to estimate user mobility based on an aggregate history of hand-offs observed in each cell. This method is then used to probabilistically predict mobiles' directions and hand-off times in a cell. For each cell, the bandwidth to be reserved for hand-offs is calculated by estimating the total sum of fractional bandwidths of the expected hand-offs within a mobility-estimation time window. Three different admission-control schemes for new connection requests using this bandwidth reservation are proposed. We also consider variations that utilize the path/location information available from the car navigation system or global positioning system (GPS). Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes extensively to show that they meet our design goal and outperform the static reservation scheme under various scenarios.