Resourse Allocation in Multi-Service Wireless Access Network

Abstract
Wireless Access Networks offer an alternative method for connecting subscribers to the global telecommunication networks. They will become widespread only if they can provide an attractive set of communication services at competitive prices and quality. Fundamental to achieving these goals is how the scarce radio frequency is managed. We evaluate a few alternative resource management principles and highlight some key design issues for such networks. The emphasis is on providing services that require certain minimum performance guarantees in order to be useful. High quality communication services and efficient resource management is only possible if the resource requirements of different services can be adequately described. We propose a framework for expressing wireless communication services in terms upon which radio resource management algorithms can operate. A price/priority component can be used to prioritize between different services. A comparison is made between fixed (PCA) and dynamic (DCA) channel allocation for multi-service TDMA networks. We show that if access networks should be capable of offering high peak-rate services, i.e., requiring more than a few percent of the available frequency spectrum, dynamic channel allocation techniques seem an imperative design component. Applications that can adapt to varying service levels enable higher resource utilization. The resulting admission control problem is formulated as a flexible knapsack problem. A few simple service-pricing models illustrate some tradeoffs involved in defining and pricing new services. Distributed quality-based power control has previously been shown to achieve substantial quality and capacity gains over a constant transmitter power scheme. We compare two classes of quality based power control, differentiated by the rate of the feedback information. A slow power control is preferable when the radio environment changes fast or coding and interleaving can be used to compensate for multi-path fading degradations. A fast scheme is preferred when communication links are established for only short periods, such as when providing busty data services, and for slowly moving terminals. A new technique is also developed to decrease the transmitter power dynamic range when using fast step-wise quality based power control. We demonstrate that with a suitable set of channel selection and channel access procedures, services for moderately busty data users can be provided without unduly degrading the quality of real-time services. This is possible without splitting of the available frequency resource between different user classes. A novel method is developed to "prepare" channels for rapid channel reassignments. Further, a traffic model for WWW and distributed file system access over wireless links is derived, based on an analysis of
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