Call admission control: solution of a general decision model with state related hand-off rate

This paper studies call admission policies for access control in cellular networks by means of a Markov decision process (MDP). This approach allows us to study a wide class of policies, including well known pure stationary as well as randomized policies, in a way that explicitly incorporates the dependency between the hand-off rate and the system state, assuming that the hand-off rate arriving to a cell is proportional to the occupancy level of the adjacent cells. In particular, we propose and analyze a nonpreemptive prioritization scheme, we term the cutoff priority policy. This policy consists of reserving a number of channels for the high priority requests stream. Using our analytical approach, we prove the proposed scheme to be optimal within the analyzed class.