Service Differentiation in Third Generation Mobile Networks

We present and analyse an approach to service differentiation in third generation mobile networks based on Wideband CDMA, that exposes a new weight parameter designed to reflect allocation of the congestible resource. The approach naturally takes into account the difference in resource scarcity for the uplink and downlink, because it is grounded on fundamental economic models for efficient utilization of resources in WCDMA. Discrete values of the weight parameter can be presented as different service classes. Finally, we present numerical experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach, and investigate its performance and transient behaviour under power control and signal quality estimation errors.