Admission control for QoS support in heterogeneous 4G wireless networks

Admission control plays a very important role in wireless systems, as it is one of the basic mechanisms for ensuring the quality of service offered to users. Based on the available network resources, it estimates the impact of adding or dropping a new session request. In both 2G and 3G systems, admission control refers to a single network. As we are moving towards heterogeneous wireless networks referred to as systems beyond 3G or 4G, admission control will need to deal with many heterogeneous networks and admit new sessions to a network that is most appropriate to supply the requested QoS. In this article we present the fundamentals of access-network-based admission control, an overview of the existing admission control algorithms for 2G and 3G networks, and finally give the design of a new admission control algorithm suitable for future 4G networks and specifically influenced by the objectives of the European WINNER project.