Virtual Partitioning for Connection Admission Control in Cellular/WLAN Interworking

Wireless wide area networks (WWANs) and wireless local area networks (WLANs) have complementary characteristics which make them suitable to jointly offer an ubiquitous wireless solution. In cellular/WLAN interworking, the quality of service (QoS) requirements for different services (e.g., voice and real-time video) can be guaranteed by using connection admission control. In this paper, we propose the use of virtual partitioning (VP) [S. Borst and D. Mitra] resource sharing scheme to facilitate admission control in a multi-service integrated cellular/WLAN system. VP pre-allocates a nominal capacity for each service based on the expected traffic and the required blocking probabilities. We first determine the policy functions corresponding to VP for new and handoff connection requests. Then, three different nominal capacities for VP are compared with the cutoff priority policy. Numerical results show that lower blocking and dropping probabilities can be achieved by VP in a wide range of conditions.