Robustness of optimal channel reservation using handover prediction in multiservice wireless networks

The aim of our study is to obtain theoretical limits for the gain that can be expected when using handover prediction and to determine the sensitivity of the system performance against different parameters. We apply an average-reward reinforcement learning approach based on afterstates to the design of optimal admission control policies in mobile multimedia cellular networks where predictive information related to the occurrence of future handovers is available. We consider a type of predictor that labels active mobile terminals in the cell neighborhood a fixed amount of time before handovers are predicted to occur, which we call the anticipation time. The admission controller exploits this information to reserve resources efficiently. We show that there exists an optimum value for the anticipation time at which the highest performance gain is obtained. Although the optimum anticipation time depends on system parameters, we find that its value changes very little when the system parameters vary within a reasonable range. We also find that, in terms of system performance, deploying prediction is always advantageous when compared to a system without prediction, even when the system parameters are estimated with poor precision.