An improved preemption policy for higher user satisfaction

Preemption is an efficient technique to provide available and reliable services to high priority connections in a QoS-enabled network. Preemption technique is governed by a preemption policy which makes the decision about which connections to preempt when resource scarcity is experienced. Previously proposed policies considered preemption rate, priority of connection and preempted bandwidth as the deciding criteria for preempting connections. In this paper, another new criterion, namely, user satisfaction is introduced in formulating the objective function that defines the preemption policy as an optimization problem. Simulation results show that the proposed policy incorporating user satisfaction outperforms the existing preemption policy in terms of customer satisfaction with a significant margin and performs comparably in terms of preemption rate and priority of preempted calls. The improved user satisfaction indicates higher prospects of revenue return and make the proposed policy highly attractive to the network providers.