An Intra-Class and Inter-Class Utility-Fair Bandwidth Adaptation Algorithm for Multi-Class Traffic in Wireless Networks

Adaptive bandwidth allocation is becoming very attractive in wireless communications since it can adjust the allocated bandwidth of ongoing calls to cope with the network resource fluctuations. In this paper, we present a novel bandwidth adaptation algorithm for multi-class traffic in wireless networks. With the proposed scheme each call in the network is assigned a utility function according to its traffic characteristics. When the network is overloaded the allocated bandwidth of ongoing calls can be dynamically degraded to free bandwidth to accept the new and handoff calls. The objective of bandwidth degradation is to achieve both intra-class and inter-class utility fairness in each individual cell i.e. all calls within the same class receive fair utility and all different classes of calls receive fair utility. Simulation results show that our bandwidth adaptation scheme is effective in attaining both kinds of utility fairness while keeping the call blocking and handoff dropping probabilities of wireless networks substantially low