Quality of service and mobility management in third generation wireless networks and beyond

Third Generation (3G) and beyond wireless networks will provide users not only with traditional circuit switched voice services, but also with packet switched data and new multimedia services with high quality images and video for person-to-person communication. Guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) and efficient mobility management for roaming users are two very important problems in such networks that have gained a lot of research attention lately. Assured QoS and efficient mobility management can be provided only with the proper cross-layer mechanisms, ranging from physical-layer channel access to session-layer QoS control.;Firstly, a new hierarchical model for micro-mobility management with QoS capability for 3G wireless access networks is proposed. In addition to QoS support, the scheme has the advantages of robustness, scalability, load balancing and fast handoff. Simulation results for the model indicate that it provides good handoff performance in the presence of multiple QoS classes of applications.;Secondly, a novel QoS guaranteed wireless packet scheduling scheme for a mixture of real-time and non-real-time services in HSDPA networks is proposed. Simulation results on the comparison with other popular scheduling schemes indicate that the proposed scheduling algorithm can provide a good tradeoff between channel efficiency and QoS provisioning.;Thirdly, an admission control scheme that handles the intra-cell mobility issue in HSDPA wireless networks is proposed. The cell mobility based admission control algorithm can provide efficient resource allocation in HSDPA networks by predicting the minimum-guaranteed resource consumption on a cell-basis. To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first proposal which explicitly considers intra-cell mobility and its impact on resource allocation in order to provide better resource utilization.;This thesis makes contributions in three aspects of 3G and beyond wireless networks to enhance QoS and mobility management performance: a hierarchical micro-mobility model, a QoS-guaranteed packet scheduling algorithm and a cell mobility based admission control scheme. The thesis primarily concentrates on the High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology that has been included in Release 5 of the UMTS Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) specifications by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP).