Resource allocation during handoff through dynamic schemes for mobile multimedia wireless networks

User mobility management is one of the important components of mobile multimedia systems. In a cell-based network, a mobile should be able to seamlessly obtain transmission resources after handoff to a new basestation. This is essential for both service continuity and quality of service assurance. We present strategies for accommodating continuous service to mobile users through estimating resource requirements of potential handoff connections. A diverse mix of heterogeneous traffic with diverse resource requirements is considered. We investigate static and dynamic resource allocation schemes. The dynamic scheme probabilistically estimates the potential number of connections that will be handed off from neighboring cells, for each class of traffic. The performance of these strategies in terms of connection blocking probabilities for handoff and local new connection requests are evaluated. The performance is also compared to a scheme previously proposed by Yu and Leung (see IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol.15, p.1208-25, 1997). The results indicate that using dynamic estimation and allocation, we can significantly reduce the dropping probability for handoff connections.