ElsevierPacheco Páramo, DF.; Pla, V.; Casares Giner, V.; Martínez Bauset, J. (2012)
AbstractThe joint management of radio resources in heterogeneous networks is considered to raise the resource occupation efficiency. We propose joint schemes for admission control and access technology selection with vertical handoff. We determine optimal policies for a radio systems that support two multiple access techniques, TDMA and WCDMA, covering the same geographical area. In addition, the system under study also supports both streaming and elastic traffic. First, we explore different optimization criteria expressed in terms of blocking probabilities and throughput. We accomplish an exhaustive numerical analysis that allows us to characterize the optimal admission policies according to the arrival type and system load. Based on this characterization, we design heuristic policies and compare their performance to ones obtained by previously proposed schemes. This analysis is also done when constraints are added to provide QoS. Second, we also study an extension of the previous system that includes vertical handoffs, in order to evaluate their impact on the system performance. For the four types of vertical handoffs considered, we determine and characterize optimal policies according to the arrival type, system load and vertical handoff action. Since it is not feasible to calculate the optimal policies online, new heuristic policies with vertical handoff are constructed and evaluated. Finally, in order to take into into account the cost of performing vertical handoffs, a new optimization problem is formulated that relates voice and data blocking with vertical handoff costs.