Abstract
Recently, sharing the radio access network (RAN) has become an important issue for 3G and beyond mobile wireless operators. In addition to user and service considerations, there are economic and technical advantages to 3G and beyond shared networks. This is driving optimizations in the deployment and development of national 3G and 4G rollouts. However, shared 3G and 4G networks exhibit many of the resource management opportunities and challenges as more complex heterogeneous traffic and sharing techniques are considered.
In this paper, we propose a roaming-based sharing adaptive partitioning with borrowing (APB) scheme where an operator is allowed to borrow from the unutilized resources originally belonging to other operators sharing the same RAN. This algorithm controls the resource sharing between the operators in addition to controlling the admission control (CAC) within each operator's domain. The borrowing margin is specified either as a fixed portion or an adaptive percentage of the unutilized resource. Furthermore, the APB CAC function makes a distinction between newly originating calls and handoff calls by assuming a higher priority level for handoff calls in the form of possibility of queuing. Therefore, the prescribed call admission control scheme provides a higher quality of service for the handoff requests of real-time services expected in 3rd and 4th G wide band code division multiple access (WCDMA) systems. Simulation results indicate that APB provides higher resource utilization under all load conditions leading in turn to increased revenue. In addition, a higher quality of service for traffic is provided especially when an operator is allowed to borrow from the unutilized resources. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.