A New Approach to Fair Bandwidth Sharing among Multimedia Cellular Networks

Abstract

Future generation cellular networks, both civilian and military, are envisioned to provide integrated services via inexpensive low powered mobile computing devices. End users often expect seamless connectivity from wire-line to wireless networks. On the other hand, cellular networks are limited in terms of resources like bandwidth, power, and the transmission medium. Therefore, meeting stringent quality of service requirements requires efficient resource management. For this purpose, we need to have an understanding of the user's requirements and subsequently design the resource allocation techniques to satisfy the specific objectives. We conclude here that space dependent contention is an inherent feature of cellular networks. Thus, it turns out that the scheduling of different links is interdependent in cellular networks, whereas different links can be scheduled independent of each other in cellular networks. As a result, bandwidth allocations inherently differ. In addition, several flows share the same wireless link and the issue of contention between flows sharing the same link arises as in cellular networks. Since link scheduling is interdependent, the bandwidth requirement of the flows in one link affects the scheduling of flows in other links as well. The challenge is to obtain a globally fair allocation in spite of this mutual independence.