A preemptive channel allocation scheme for multimedia traffic in mobile wireless networks

This paper presents a channel allocation model with both partial and full preemptive capabilities for multimedia traffic in mobile wireless networks. The different types of multimedia traffic in transmitting through next-generation networks possess different characteristics and demand an adequate channel allocation scheme to fulfill individual Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In the proposed model, multimedia traffic is classified into three classes corresponding to different priority levels in a decreasing order. To effectively reduce the dropping probability, a higher-priority handoff call is allowed to fully or partially preempt any lower-priority ongoing calls when the channel capacity becomes insufficient. In addition, to prevent from possible starvation of the lowest-priority traffic, a portion of system channels are purposely reserved. Performance measures, including the dropping probability of handoff calls, the call-interruption probability that an ongoing call is forced to termination due to full preemption, and the bandwidth reduction ratio due to partial preemption, are investigated through an analytical model built with 4-D Markov chains. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.