Provisioning multimedia wireless networks for better QoS: RRM strategies for 3G W-CDMA

Third-generation mobile communication systems will bring a wide range of new services with different quality of service requirements and will open the ability to exploit radio resource management functions to guarantee a certain target QoS, to maintain the planned coverage area and to offer a high-capacity while using the radio resources in an efficient way. RRM functions impact the overall system efficiency and the operator infrastructure cost, so they will definitively play an important role in a mature 3G scenario. In order to provide some insight into radio resource management (RRM) strategies implementation, a range of representative case-studies with several innovative algorithms are presented and supported by simulation results in a realistic UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network scenario as devised in the 3GGP standardization forum. In particular, a decentralized uplink transmission rate selection algorithm in the short term, a congestion control mechanism to cope with overload situations, and downlink scheduling for layered streaming video packets are proposed.