An advanced bandwidth adaptation mechanism for LTE systems

In this paper, we propose a bandwidth adaptation mechanism for 3GPP LTE which partially releases bearers´ resources for admission of a new bearer during congestion periods. Each active bearer may contribute into the downgrading mechanism up to its minimum resource requirement according to a bearer contribution attribute called the “downgrading index”. This index incorporates three attributes of an active bearer into the downgrading process. These attributes are the bearer priority, QoS over-provisioning and communication channel quality. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated using simulation. Numerical results show that the probabilities of bearer blocking and handoff bearer dropping improve significantly when employing our proposed mechanism. Further, the results show the capability of the proposed mechanism in fine-tuning the service provider´s generated revenue.