Exploiting user profiles to support Differentiated Services in next-generation wireless networks

In the next-generation wireless network, user profiles such as the location, the velocity (both speed and direction), and the resource requirements of the mobile device can be accurately determined and maintained by the network on a per-user basis. We investigate the design of a Differentiated-Services architecture which exploits user profiles to maximize the network efficiency and which supports differentiated services classes, each with different quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. In this paper, we provide implementation details of such an architecture for the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) network. The key underlying primitive of the architecture is the use of user profiles to perform advance resource reservation in target cells of the wireless cellular network. We identify the design tradeoffs and present performance results for an architecture consisting of two service classes, namely (1) a higher-cost profiled service with higher QoS, and (2) a lower-cost non-profiled service with best-effort QoS. Our analysis indicates that a significant decrease in the dropping probability - and, hence, higher QoS - can be guaranteed to users who subscribe to the profiled service. We examine the tradeoffs associated with some of the key system parameters including the reservation distance and the reservation granularity, and we determine their values which maximize the improvement in the dropping probability for all users.