On utility-fair bandwidth adaptation for multi-class traffic QoS provisioning in wireless networks

The ability to adjust the allocated bandwidth of ongoing calls to cope with wireless network resource fluctuations is becoming increasingly important. In this paper, we describe a utility-based bandwidth adaptation scheme for multi-class traffic quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning in wireless networks. With the proposed scheme, each call is assigned a utility function according to its adaptive characteristics. Depending on the network load the allocated bandwidth of ongoing calls are upgraded or degraded dynamically such that each call receives fair utility. The quantization of utility function by dividing the utility range into a fixed number of equal intervals is a key feature of our proposed utility-fair algorithm. Appropriate call admission control and bandwidth reservation policies are also integrated into the proposed scheme to provide QoS guarantees to the new and handoff calls. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme compared with two other existing ones. Results show that our bandwidth adaptation scheme is effective in achieving utility fairness while keeping the call blocking and handoff dropping probabilities substantially low.