Performance Analysis of Radio Resource Allocation for Multimedia Traffic in Cellular Networks

Abstract

Future communication systems are expected to provide a broad range of multimedia services with guaranteed quality of service (QoS). Thus, effective management of radio resources is important to enhance the network performance. In this paper, we proposed an analytical model to study the performance of radio resource allocation for cellular networks where real-time (RT) and non-real-time (NRT) data traffic are considered in addition to voice traffic. To guarantee the performance of voice traffic, preemptive priority is used so that voice calls can preempt data packets and RT data traffic preempts NRT data traffic. By reserving channels specifically for RT data, the packet loss probability and mean queueing delay can be reduced, meanwhile, the performance of NRT data can also be improved. This is achieved at the expense of increasing voice blocking probability. Thus, the number of reserved channels can be adjusted to control the voice blocking probability while improving the performance of data traffic. The strategy of buffer-only-for-preempted-RT-packets can achieve relatively low queueing delay of RT traffic. Moreover, the maximum allowed NRT data users can be set to a high value to reduce the packet loss probability of NRT traffic while keeping the performance of voice traffic and RT data traffic unchanged.