A self-adapting connection admission control solution for mobile WiMAX: Enabling dynamic switching of admission control algorithms based on predominant network usage profiles

WiMAX is a connection-oriented wireless network that provides QoS in metropolitan broadband communications. One important component in WiMAX QoS provisioning and management is the Connection Admission Control (CAC), which must be aware of the network conditions (e.g., user traffic demands and physical aspects). In our research, we define the association between a particular user traffic demand and a specific physical condition as a network usage profile. State-of-the-art proposals focus on optimizing CAC algorithms considering a single network usage profile; the adaptation of CAC algorithms when the predominant network usage profile changes is partially or fully neglected. In this article, we introduce a self-adapting CAC solution that, using a library of CAC algorithms, is able to switch the running algorithm according to the current network usage profile. The evaluation results, obtained through simulations, demonstrate that our self-adapting CAC solution is able to detect the changes on the predominant network usage profile. In addition, the results show how much different profiles can impact on the efficiency of CAC algorithms, thus confirming the need of switching the running CAC algorithm so that QoS can be guaranteed for the ongoing connections.