Towards coarse-grained mobile QoS

Supporting Quality of Service is an important objective for future mobile and wireless systems, and requires resource reservation and admission control to achieve. In this paper, we introduce a novel coarse grained approach to admission control termed Virtual Bottleneck Cell. Our approach is designed to scale to many users and handoffs, while simultaneously controlling “hot spots” and system bottlenecks. The key technique is to hierarchically control the virtual system, ensuring QoS objectives are satisfied without requiring models or accurate predictions of the users’ future locations. We develop a simple analytical model to study the system and illustrate several key components of the approach. Finally, we perform simulations in a two-dimensional network to compare the performance obtained with Virtual Bottleneck Cell with alternate schemes, including the optimal off line algorithm.