Admission Control for Delay-Bounded Message Transfer in an MMS Environment

The multimedia messaging service environment (MMSE) integrates already-existing messaging systems in mobile networks and the Internet, where the multimedia messaging service (MMS) server is responsible for the handling of incoming and outgoing messages. We note that, when the load offered to the MMS server is increased beyond the capacity limit, particularly when hotspot traffic caused by the movement of users suddenly appears, the latency to process the message submission request becomes excessive, consequently resulting in the expiration of the message delivery and, hence, the discarding of the submitted message contents. Some bandwidth provided by mobile networks is thus wasted to transmit these useless contents. To minimize bandwidth wastage, this paper proposes a delay-bounded admission control (DBAC) mechanism to prevent an MMS server from becoming overloaded and to ensure that all accepted submission requests will be serviced within the desired time of expiry for the message delivery. In addition, by taking into account the effect of user mobility, this paper develops an analytical model to study the system performance for the DBAC-enabled MMS server. The analytical model is validated by simulation.