An Admission Control Framework Integrating Radio and IP-Transport in 3GPP-based Networks

Within the context of Beyond 3G (B3G) wireless networks, there is a clear migration towards the usage of IP/MPLS transport networks within the backhaul part of the radio access network (RAN). Despite expected cost savings and ease of maintenance, such a migration imposes new challenges on the IP QoS provisioning. These new challenges are fuelled by, on one hand, the traffic increase in the RAN due to the more efficient air interfaces, and on the other hand, potential bandwidth limitations likely to exist in typical backhaul network deployments. This paper develops a call admission control (CAC) framework that considers both the radio interface and also the IP transport network. This leads to a new paradigm where transport resources are considered not only at the network dimensioning stage but are included in an integrated resource management scheme. The CAC framework is validated by analysing a specific CAC algorithm in the context ofUTRANwith IP-based transport.