Radio resource management in future wireless networks: requirements and limitations

Comparing market estimates for wireless personal communication and considering proposals for wideband multimedia services with the existing spectrum allocations for these types of systems show that spectrum resource management remains an important topic in the near and distant future. In this article the authors start by presenting a quite general formulation of the radio resource management problem where the three key allocation decisions are concerned with waveforms ("channels"), access ports (or base stations), and, finally, with transmitter power. Some approaches to these problems found in the literature are reviewed. In particular, the principles of random channel allocation schemes, as found in frequency-hopping or direct-sequence CDMA systems, are compared with deterministic dynamic channel allocation schemes. The article closes by giving an outlook of some of the key problems in resource management in future wireless multimedia systems.