A differential bandwidth reservation policy for multimedia wireless networks

Provisioning of seamless communication for mobile terminal (MT) handoffs as well as guaranteeing a certain level of quality-of-service (QoS) to ongoing connections and new connections are critical issues in multimedia wireless networks. We present a differential bandwidth reservation(DBR) algorithm that can meet these requirements. For bandwidth reservation, the DBR scheme examines a sector of cells, which are located along the way to which the MT might move. The sector of cells are further divided into two regions depending on whether they have an immediate impact on the handoff or not. Two different bandwidth reservation policies are applied to cells in the two regions to optimize the connection dropping rate while maximizing the connection acceptance rate. Two possible MT movements are analyzed using the DBR mechanism. In the first case, no knowledge of the user's moving path is assumed to be available, while in the second case, prior knowledge of a user profile is used in bandwidth reservation, and is called the user profile-based DBR (UPDBR) algorithm. Simulation results indicate that the DBR algorithm is more adaptable to optimize the system performance in terms of call dropping rate compared to prior schemes. The UPDBR scheme can exploit the MT's moving path history for better bandwidth utilization as well as reduction in the number of communication messages compared to the DBR scheme. The overall results show that the proposed schemes not only provide better performance, but also exploit the current state of the system in optimizing different performance parameters.