The recent switch from analog to digital TV broadcasting around the world has led to the development of communications standards that consider the use of TV White Spaces (TVWS). One such standard is the IEEE 802.22 wireless regional area network (WRAN), which considers the use of TVWS to provide broadband wireless services over long transmission links, and therefore presents an opportunity to bring connectivity and data-based services from urban to rural areas. Services that could greatly benefit from the deployment of wireless broadband data links between urban and rural areas are those related to telemedicine and m-health. To enable proper telemedicine service delivery from urban (e.g. an urban hospital) to rural locations (e.g. a rural clinic) it is of paramount importance to provide a certain quality of service (QoS) level. In this context, QoS provisioning for telemedicine applications over wireless networks presents a major challenge that must be addressed to fulfill the potential that rural wireless telemedicine has to offer. In this paper, a cross-layer approach combining medium access control (MAC) and application (APP) layers is proposed with the aim of reducing blocking probability in teleconsulting services operating over IEEE802.22/WRANs. At the APP layer, a teleconsulting traffic profile based on utilization rates is defined. On the other hand, at the MAC layer, an Adaptive Bandwidth Management (ABM) mechanism is used to perform a QoS-based classification of teleconsulting services and then dynamically allocate the bandwidth requirements. Three teleconsulting services with different bandwidth requirements are considered in order to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach: high-resolution teleconsulting, medium-resolution teleconsulting, and audio-only teleconsulting. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to reduce blocking probability by using different criteria for service modes within the admission control scheme.

The energy consumption of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry, which has become a serious problem, is mostly due to the network infrastructure rather than the mobile terminals. In this paper, we focus on reducing the energy consumption of base stations (BSs) by adjusting their working modes (active or sleep). Specifically, the objective is to minimize the energy consumption while satisfying quality of service (QoS, e.g., blocking probability) requirement and, at the same time, avoiding frequent mode switching to reduce signaling and delay overhead. The problem is modeled as a dynamic programming (DP) problem, which is NP-hard in general. Based on cooperation among neighboring BSs, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to reduce the size of state space as well as that of action space. Simulations demonstrate that, with the proposed algorithm, the active BS pattern well meets the time variation and the non-uniform spatial distribution of system traffic. Moreover, the tradeoff between the energy saving from BS sleeping and the cost of switching is well balanced by the proposed scheme.

We propose a scheme of MultiCast Routing and Wavelength Assignment (MC-RWA) to establish light-tree for dynamic multicast session for the Wavelength Division Multiplex (WDM) network by choosing the wavelength that leads to a reduction in blocking probabilities by using a parameter Δ. Δ is defined as the overall reduction of connectivity of the nodes in the network caused by a wavelength assignment process when using a particular wavelength, and we assign wavelength resources to the multicast session by choosing the Δ which leads to smallest reduction in connectivity. Through computer simulation, we show that the proposed scheme has lower blocking probabilities when compared with minimum cost scheme under the condition that wavelength conversion is not allowed.

This article proposes a method that can calculate the blocking probability of multi-service cellular systems with Wideband Code Division Multiple Access radio interface. The method considers a finite and an infinite source population and takes into account the interdependency of calls service processes in neighboring cells and in both the uplink and the downlink directions. The basis of the proposed method is the fixed-point methodology. A comparison of the results of analytical calculations to those of simulations confirms the accuracy of the proposed method. The proposed scheme can realize cost-effective radio resource management in 3G mobile networks and can be easily applied to network capacity calculations.

Traffic Engineering (TE) is important for improving QoS in forwarding paths by efficient use of network resources. In fact, MPLS allows several detour paths to be (pre-)established for some source-destination pair as well as its primary path of minimum hops. Thus, we focus on a two-phase path management scheme using these two kinds of paths. In the first phase, each primary path is allocated to a flow on a specific source-destination pair if the path is not congested, i.e., if its utilization is less than some predetermined threshold; otherwise, as the second phase, one of the detour paths is allocated randomly if the path is available. Therefore, in this paper, we analytically evaluate this path management scheme by extending the M/M/c/c queueing system, and through some numerical results we investigate the impact of a threshold on the flow-blocking probability. Through some numerical results, we discuss the adequacy of the path management scheme for MPLS-TE.

Vertically stacked optical banyan (VSOB) is an attractive architecture for constructing banyan-based optical switches. Blocking behaviors analysis is an effective approach to studying network performance and finding a graceful compromise among hardware costs, blocking probability and crosstalk tolerance; however, little has been done on analyzing the blocking behavior of VSOB networks under crosstalk constraint which adds a new dimension to the switching performance. In this paper, we study the overall blocking behavior of a VSOB network under various degree of crosstalk, where an upper bound on the blocking probability of the network is developed. The upper bound depicts accurately the overall blocking behavior of a VSOB network as verified by extensive simulation results and it agrees with the strictly nonblocking condition of the network. The derived upper bound is significant because it reveals the inherent relationship between blocking probability and network hardware cost, by which a desirable tradeoff can be made between them under various degree of crosstalk constraint. Also, the upper bound shows how crosstalk adds a new dimension to the theory of switching systems.

Due to the dynamics of topology and resources, Call Admission Control (CAC) plays a significant role for increasing resource utilization ratio and guaranteeing users' QoS requirements in wireless/mobile networks. In this paper, a dynamic multi-threshold CAC scheme is proposed to serve multi-class service in a wireless/mobile network. The thresholds are renewed at the beginning of each time interval to react to the changing mobility rate and network load. To find suitable thresholds, a reward-penalty model is designed, which provides different priorities between different service classes and call types through different reward/penalty policies according to network load and average call arrival rate. To speed up the running time of CAC, an Optimized Genetic Algorithm (OGA) is presented, whose components such as encoding, population initialization, fitness function and mutation etc., are all optimized in terms of the traits of the CAC problem. The simulation demonstrates that the proposed CAC scheme outperforms the similar schemes, which means the optimization is realized. Finally, the simulation shows the efficiency of OGA.

In this paper, a channel allocation scheme is studied for overlay wireless networks to optimize connection-level QoS. The contributions of our work are threefold. First, a channel allocation strategy using both horizontal channel borrowing and vertical traffic overflowing (HCB-VTO) is presented and analyzed. When all the channels in a given macro-cell are used, high-mobility real-time handoff requests can borrow channels from adjacent homogeneous cells. In case that the borrowing requests fail, handoff requests may also be overflowed to heterogeneous cells, if possible. Second, high-mobility real-time service is prioritized by allowing it to pre-empt channels currently used by other services. And third, to meet the high QoS requirements of some services and increase the utilization of radio resources, certain services can be transformed between real-time services and non-real-time services as necessary. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed schemes can improve system performance.

Dynamic routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) is an attractive method for the efficient use of network resources in all-optical networks. We present a novel fixed alternate routing method referred to as Overlap-Degree Aware (ODA) routing in all-optical networks. A lot of researchers have focused on the shortest path routing and alternate shortest path routing taking into acount link and wavelength usage so as to reduce the consumption of network resources. The authors, however, believe that in order to minimize the blocking probability, it is important to consider not only the consumption of link and wavelength resources but also the existence of the other flows when a routing decision is made. The ODA routing decides routes using the knowledge of ingress-egress node pairs, and tries to prevent future path requests from being blocked unnecessarily by reserving link and wavelength resources for the future requests. Our simulation results show that our new routing algorithm outperforms Fixed-Alternate Routing (FAR) and Weighted Least Congestion Routing (WLCR) from the viewpoint of call blocking probability.

The call-level performance modelling is a challenge in the highly heterogeneous environment of modern telecom networks, due to the presence of elastic traffic. In this paper, we review existing teletraffic loss models and propose a model for elastic traffic of service-classes with finite population (quasi-random call arrival process). Upon arrival, calls have contingency alternative bandwidth requirements that depend on thresholds which indicate the available/occupied link bandwidth (state dependent model). Calls are admitted under the complete sharing policy, and can tolerate bandwidth compression, while in-service. We prove a recurrent formula for the efficient calculation of the link occupancy distribution and consequently the call blocking probabilities and link utilization. The accuracy of the proposed model is verified by simulation and is found to be quite satisfactory. Comparative results with other existing models show the necessity and the effectiveness of the proposed model. Its potential applications are mainly in the environment of wireless networks.

Internet engineering task force (IETF) has proposed hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) in order to reduce a frequent location registration of a mobile node in mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). All traffics toward a mobile node must be transmitted through a MAP in HMIPv6. This brings unnecessary packet latency because of the increased processing cost of packet at the MAP. At this point, the processing cost of packet at the MAP is influenced by the packet arrival rate for a mobile node, cell mobility rate and the number of mobile nodes in MAP domain. In this paper, we analyze the MAP's performance considering the above elements. For this, we compare total cost of HMIPv6 with total cost of MIPv6 as MAP's capability after we define Markov chain model for performance analysis. Also, we define network's total profit as total cost of MIPv6 minus total cost of HMIPv6. Then, we can find optimal capability of MAP such that total profit has maximum value. Also, we use the blocking probability by the MAP's capability as performance estimation element. As a conclusion, we can observe both HMIPv6's performance by the MAP's capability and optimal capability of the MAP, and blocking probability form a relationship of trade off between them.

This paper studies a multiband mobile communication system to support both high data rate services and wide service coverage, using high and low frequency resources with different propagation characteristics. In the multiband system, multiple frequency bands are managed by a base station and one of the frequency bands is adaptively allocated to a terminal depending on his channel quality. By limiting the low frequency resources to a terminal not covered by the higher frequencies, the presented multiband system can accommodate many terminals providing wide coverage area, as if all radio resources have low frequency. From numerical results, the multiband system can provide wide service coverage area for much larger number of terminals than conventional systems. It is also found that an appropriate balance of multiple frequency resources is essential to achieve high capacity.

In this letter, a more exact analysis scheme for outage probability is proposed for uplink of direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems. In the previous works, the effect of call admission control (CAC) on signal to interference ratio (SIR) is considered to evaluate the performance of the outage probability for CDMA systems, however, the effect of CAC on system states is not accurately considered. In this letter, we first analyze the system states more exactly by taking the effect of CAC on CDMA system states into account. Then, the exact probability of the outage is derived according to the exact system states. The probability of the system states and the outage of the proposed approximation scheme are compared with the results of the traditional analysis schemes and the computer simulation. Compared with traditional analysis schemes, the numerical results of the proposed analysis scheme is more close to the computer simulation results.

A wireless multi-hop virtual cellular network (VCN) was recently proposed to avoid the large peak transmit power, resulting from the high transmission rates expected for future mobile communication systems. In VCN, calls hop through several links to reach the central port, which is the gateway to the network. With the use of a routing algorithm based on the total uplink transmit power minimization criterion, the total transmit power of all the multi-hop links between the mobile terminal and the central port can be significantly reduced, in comparison with the present (single-hop) cellular network. In this paper, an "on-demand" channel assignment strategy, using the channel segregation dynamic channel allocation (CS-DCA) algorithm, is proposed for multi-hop DS-CDMA VCN. Computer simulation is conducted to evaluate the blocking probability performance and make a comparison between the VCN and the present cellular network.

A combination of horizontal expansion and vertical stacking of optical Banyan (HVOB) is the general architecture for building Banyan-based optical cross-connects (OXCs), and the intrinsic crosstalk problem of optical signals is a major constraint in designing OXCs. In this paper, we analyze the blocking behavior of HVOB networks and develop the lower bound on blocking probability of a HVOB network that is free of first-order crosstalk in switching elements. The proposed lower-bound is significant because it provides network designers an effective tool to estimate the minimum blocking probability they can expect from a HVOB architecture regardless what kind of routing strategy to be adopted. Our lower bound can accurately depict the overall blocking behavior in terms of the minimum blocking probability in a HVOB network, as verified by extensive simulation based on a network simulator with both random routing and packing routing strategies. Surprisingly, the simulated and theoretical results show that our lower bound can be used to efficiently estimate the blocking probability of HVOB networks applying packing strategy. Thus, our analytical model can guide network designers to find the tradeoff among the number of planes (stacked copies), the number of SEs, the number of stages and blocking probability in a HVOB network applying packing strategy.

For a CDMA system with a single carrier, we consider a call control policy at each cell, which gives priority to handoff calls over new calls while meeting the overall call quality. New calls are first under the call control of the threshold type, and then receive services together with the handoff calls but under the outage restriction guaranteeing a pre-specified call quality. An optimization model with such quality-guaranteeing constraints is formulated, which is to determine the threshold value for each cell, minimizing the new call blocking probability. We propose a solution heuristic, with which a number of simulations are conducted under a variety of traffic environments. The computational experiments evaluate the usefulness of our call control scheme in that handoff calls are given an appropriate level of priority while the system capacity is effectively utilized.

We propose a new call admission control (CAC) scheme for voice calls in cellular mobile communication networks. It is assumed that the rejection of a hand-off call is less desirable than that of a new call, for a hand-off call loss would cause a severe mental pain to a user. We consider the pains of rejecting new and hand-off calls as different costs. The key idea of our CAC is to restrict the admission of new calls in order to minimize the total expected costs per unit time over the long term. An optimal policy is derived from a semi-Markov decision process in which the intervals between successive decision epochs are exponentially distributed. Based on this optimal policy, we calculate the steady state probability for the number of established voice connections in a cell. We then evaluate the probability of blocking new calls and the probability of forced termination of hand-off calls. In the numerical experiments, it is found that the forced termination probability of hand-off calls is reduced significantly by our CAC scheme at the slight expense of the blocking probability of new calls and the channel utilization. Comparison with the static guard channel scheme is made.

In this letter, we analyze blocking probabilities for prioritized multi-classes in optical burst switching (OBS) networks. The blocking probability of each traffic class can be analytically evaluated by means of class aggregation and iteration method. The analytic results are validated with results garnered from simulation tests.

Call Admission Control (CAC) is a very important issue in CDMA systems to guarantee a required quality of service (QoS) and to increase system capacity. In this paper, we proposed and analyzed the CAC scheme using multiple criterions (MCAC), which can provide a quicker processing time and better performance. One is based on the number of active users with the minimum/maximum threshold by considering the spillover ratio, and the other is based on the signal to interference ratio (SIR). If active users are lower/higher than the minimum/maximum number of users threshold (N_min )/(N_max ), we accept/reject the new call without any other considerations based on the first criterion. And if the number of active users is between the N_min and N_max, we consider the current SIR to guarantee QoS based on the second criterion. Then the system accepts the new call when the SIR satisfies the system requirements, otherwise, the call is rejected. The multiple criterions scheme is investigated and its performance is compared with the number of user based CAC and power based CAC.

In finding the optimal solution of virtual-path bandwidth allocation for large-scale networks, existing searching algorithms frequently call the process which calculate the bandwidth for given call blocking probability (CBP) and traffic loads. This is an inverse process of calculating CBP for given traffic loads and bandwidth. Because there is no analytic expression of calculating CBP, the process of calculating bandwidth with given CBP and traffic adopts an iteration algorithm. It leads to a tedious computation process. In this letter, a fast bandwidth evaluation algorithm is proposed and applied to the field of virtual path bandwidth allocation that aims at minimizing the worst call blocking probabilities in the network. The algorithm is proved to be accurate and fast. Finally, we provide comparison curves for the exact optimal CBPs obtained in the case of using OPBM against that of DCLPBM aided by the fast bandwidth evaluation algorithm.