On the Influence of User Behaviour and Admission Control on System Performance in HS-DSCH

In this paper we investigate the need for admission control for the high-speed downlink shared channel (HS-DSCH) through the evaluation of two admission control mechanisms. One mechanism uses the number of active users in a cell as a metric and the other one uses the mean downlink throughput of a user. We also introduce a model for user behaviour in which the goodput of a completed file download decides if further downloads are made. In order to measure user-experienced quality we use a utility function for transforming per-flow goodput into a user satisfaction index. System performance, measured by total user satisfaction and total goodput, is evaluated for a range of session arrival rates and admission control limits. This evaluation is done using the ns-2 simulator, together with extensions of our own. If the objective is to maximise goodput, our results show that no admission control is needed. Maximising user satisfaction benefits from an admission control. We also note that the impact of user behaviour is not insignificant