Joint admission control through vertical handoffs in heterogeneous wireless networks

This paper considers optimizing the utilization of radio resources in a heterogeneous networks consisting of a WLAN and a CDMA network. We propose a joint admission control mechanism for multimedia traffic that exploits vertical handoff as an effective tool to enhance radio resource management while guaranteeing handoff user´s QoS requirements. The network resources utilized by the vertical handoff user are captured by a link utility function. A signaling cost is used to model the signaling and processing load incurred when vertical handoff is performed. The performance of the joint admission control mechanism is analyzed based on the formulation of the admission control actions. Voice and data applications are considered in the performance evaluation, and the simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can efficiently relieve the congestion, balance the load and improve the overall network reward.