Multi-Class Resource Management in a Cellular/WLAN Integrated Network

Resource management is an important aspect for the integrated system of cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs). This study proposed a resource management scheme for the cellular/WLAN integrated network to support multiple service classes, namely, the conversational, streaming, and interactive classes. Resource sharing based on virtual partitioning is employed in the cellular network to overcome the limitation of contention-based WLANs in multi-class support. Further, a dynamic load balancing policy is proposed to distribute the traffic load to the integrated cell and WLAN based on factors such as service class and system utilization. The dedicated resource allocation of the cellular network is exploited to avoid the large overhead paid for WLANs to support realtime conversational and streaming classes. The elastic interactive traffic is manipulated flexibly to minimize the bursty overflow traffic and balance the utilization of both systems. The overall performance of the integrated network is significantly improved by the proposed resource management scheme.