A novel approach for combined Joint Call Admission Control and Dynamic Bandwidth Adaptation in heterogeneous wireless networks

Due to the fast evolution of mobile devices, a high penetration of notebooks and smart-phones, and the growing demand for high rate services, e.g. mobile video and P2P services, modern radio access networks require efficient means for call admission control and radio resource management. In particular, network operators, managing co-deployed, heterogeneous access technologies, are interested in an optimized utilization of their infrastructure while maximizing their revenue. For ensuring maximum operator gain and optimized system performance, we propose to handle diverse user service requests, ranging from voice only to bandwidth-consuming streaming services, collaboratively by a combined, heuristic Joint Call Admission Control (JCAC) and Dynamic Bandwidth Adaptation (DBA) approach. This approach aims at maximizing overall system utilization and, hence, the mobile network operator's revenues, while keeping the blocking and dropping rates at acceptably low levels, and ensuring that Quality of Service (QoS) demands of the diverse services are met. Therefore, we introduce a novel utility definition of services which is used in the proposed algorithms. It represents a generic measurement of the profit that is gained by the mobile network operator. The JCAC and DBA algorithms are realized tightly coupled and ensure that a maximum number of requested services can be supported by the cooperatively managed, wireless systems in the considered service area. Further, system utilization is optimized by improving the QoS characteristics of the already granted elastic services. In order to evaluate the algorithms for a given scenario of co-deployed Long Term Evolution (LTE) and High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network nodes, an event-driven simulation platform based on OMNeT++ has been developed, including all relevant entities of 3GPP's SAE. The results show an improvement in the overall gained utility of the mobile network operator compared to standard approaches, and optimized system performance w.r.t. utilization as well as acceptable low blocking and dropping rates.