A. I. Zreikat , K. Begain

 Abstract

Call Admission Control (CAC) is one of the important means to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) in the telecommunication systems. This is especially true in the mobile networks due to their limited capacity. In the Second Generation (2G) GSM systems, the cell has static coverage and capacity and, therefore, the call is rejected if all channels in the given cell are occupied. In the Third Generation (3G) systems, such as UMTS, cells have dynamic coverage and capacity that depend on the interference levels and the number of active connections in the cell. In this paper, a new sophisticated multi-cell CAC algorithm is presented that uses the soft handover feature of the UMTS systems to provide multiple goals: (i) provide efficient utilization of the available capacity, (ii) protect the QoS of existing connections, and (iii) prevent the loss of coverage resulting from the so-called “Cell Breathing”. The algorithm works on balancing the load over the network by transferring some connections from the overloaded cells to the neighboring cell with lighter load. Therefore, it achieves more balanced utilization over the whole network. The algorithm is evaluated on a network cluster of seven cells via a detailed simulation under different traffic and interference conditions.

 Proceedings of the 4th Informatics Workshop for Research Students, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK, Wednesday, pp. 17-22, 20 November, 2002.