Time-aware Utility-based Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks

Abstract — This article presents a time-aware admission control and resource allocation scheme in wireless networks, in the context of a future generation cellular network. The quality levels (and their respective utility) of different connections are specified using discrete resource-utility (R-U) functions. The scheme uses these R-U functions for allocating and reallocating bandwidth to connections, aiming to maximise the accumulated utility of the system. However, different applications react differently to resource reallocations. Therefore at each allocation time point the following factors are taken into account: the age of the connection, a disconnection (drop) penalty and the sensitiveness to reallocation frequency. The evaluation of our approach shows a superior performance compared to a recent adaptive bandwidth allocation scheme (RBBS). In addition we have studied the overhead that performing a reallocation imposes on the infrastructure. To minimise this overhead, we present an algorithm that efficiently reduces the number of reallocations, while remaining within a given utility bound