Revenue Aware Preemption Policy in Multimedia Communication Networks

Preemption of low priority call connections to accommodate high priority call connections is a widely recommended technique in a multimedia communication network. A preemption policy is required to make decision about which connections to preempt when resource scarcity is experienced. In literature, priority of connection, preempted bandwidth and the number of preempted connections are proposed as the three basic criteria governing a preemption policy. So far revenue prospect of a communication provider, specially in relation to consumer satisfaction, has not been incorporated in preemption policy. In this paper we introduce revenue index, a metric that indicates the level of estimated consumer satisfaction, as an additional criterion to be used in conjunction with the above three. Revenue index is an indicative of long term revenue prospect of an enterprise. We present formulation of the preemption policy as an optimization problem. A heuristic to approximate the optimal solution is also derived. Simulation results show that the proposed model of preemption policy when adopted by a network provider ensures better consumer satisfaction for the end users which leads to higher revenue index for the network provider