An Integrated System for QoS Provisioning in 3G WCDMA Cellular Networks

This paper proposes an integrated Power-based system for QoS provisioning in 3G WCDMA cellular networks. The proposed system comprises a QoS-profile aware Call Admission Control (CAC), a QoS-profile driven congestion control, and a reservation-less real cell boundary aware handoff prioritization mechanism. Both Congestion control and handoff prioritization incorporate user service degradation descriptor (SDD) as a key enabling QoS parameters, in addition to the class of traffic and the required bandwidth. The former supercedes to the traditional closed loop power control while the latter implements a QoS-differentiated prioritization of Soft handoff without reservation. A cluster of 7 cells underlying a road junction controlled by one Radio Network Controller (RNC) has been used to evaluate the proposed integrated system as a function of the offered load. Both cluster-wide forced terminations and network utilization have been measured, and the results are reported for different QoS Adaptation strategies. These measurements are contrasted to a non QoS-aware system, that is, a system where blind closed-loop power control and prioritization mechanisms are used. The results show that a fair dropping strategy (that is dropping solely based on cost -power/bitof connection) to resolve congestion offers the best compromise between low dropping rate and maximum utilization, while prioritizing handoffs.