An adaptive measured-based preassignment scheme with connection-level QoS support for mobile networks

This paper presents a new adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme to prevent handoff failure in wireless cellular networks, known as the measurement-based preassignment (MPr) technique. This technique is particularly useful in micro/pico cellular networks which offers quality-of-service (QoS) guarantee against call dropping. The proposed MPr scheme distinguishes itself from the well-known guarded channel (GC) based schemes in that it allows the handoff calls to utilize a prereserved channel pool before competing for the shared channels with new call arrivals. The key advantage of the proposed MPr scheme is that it enables easy derivation of the number of channels that needs to be reserved for handoff based on a predetermined handoff dropping probability, without the need for solving the often complex Markov chain required in GC schemes, thus, making the proposed MPr scheme simple and efficient for implementation. This is essential in handling multiple traffic types with potentially different QoS requirements. In addition, the MPr scheme is adaptive in that it can dynamically adjust the number of reserved channels for the handoff according to the periodical measurement of the traffic status within a local cell, thus completely eliminating the signaling overhead for status information exchange among cells mandated in most existing channel allocation schemes. Numerical results and comparisons are given to illustrate the tradeoff.