Tutorial 1

The next-generation wireless data communications have been envisioned to be supported by heterogeneous networks using various wireless access technologies. The popular cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) present perfectly complementary characteristics in terms of service capacity, mobility support, and quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning. The cellular/WLAN interworking is thus an effective way to promote the evolution of wireless networks. As an essential aspect of the interworking, resource allocation is vital for efficient utilization of the overall resources. In this tutorial, we introduce and analyze effective traffic assignment/reassignment strategies and admission control policies to distribute multi-service traffic to the overlay cell or WLAN. As such, the multi-service provisioning can be enhanced by taking a good advantage of the complementary network strength and an overlay structure. The overall resource utilization and QoS satisfaction are improved substantially by taking into account the multi-service traffic characteristics, such as the delay-sensitivity of voice traffic, elasticity and heavy-tailedness of data traffic, and rate-adaptiveness of video streaming traffic. Also, the impact of user mobility is properly addressed in the tutorial. Distributed implementation is enabled with a randomized strategy to reduce deployment cost.