Resource Allocation for Conversational, Streaming, and Interactive Services in Cellular/WLAN Interworking

Multi-service support is an important motivation for interworking between the cellular network and wireless local area networks (WLANs). The complementary strengths of the two networks can be effectively combined to enhance service provisioning. In this paper, we investigate how to properly allocate the overall resources in the integrated network to conversational, streaming, and interactive services. The proposed strategy exploits the essential traffic characteristics such as bursty video streams and elastic data traffic. The system performance is significantly improved over the WLAN-first scheme by applying admission control with service-differentiated session assignment and session migration via vertical handoff.