Bandwidth allocation strategies for multimedia services in wireless networks

In wireless networks, multimedia traffic will require an efficient utilization of bandwidth. The network designer may choose to assign different amounts of bandwidth to different traffic classes. The motivation for such an approach stems from the desire to support a variety of multimedia services with an acceptable range of Quality-of-Service. A desirable goal is to balance the needs of the various QoS levels with the need of the system to accommodate as many heterogeneous connections as possible. Our research focuses on providing guaranteed Quality-of-Service with high bandwidth utilization, while servicing the largest possible number of connections. We propose an efficient bandwidth allocation algorithm for a pre-specified range of acceptable QoS levels, where a moving boundary exists. If there is not sufficient bandwidth to satisfy the best QoS requirements for different calls, the proposed scheme will degrade the QoS of exiting calls in order to free some bandwidth to satisfy the minimum QoS level. The simulation results illustrate that it is able to let the system accommodate many more calls than the static case, and at the same time the call blocking rate is decreased.