Contribution to radio resource management in cellular access networks: Analytical models and performance evaluation

Since its commence more than twenty years ago, mobile cellular telephony has experienced an enormous growth and important transformations and, even today, it is immersed in a phase of growth and change.;Unlike fixed networks, where the task of efficient capacity management is pushed into the background by the enormous capacity of optical fiber, the scarcity of the spectrum, which is the physical medium at the radio interface in mobile networks, makes efficient resource management an important issue. Although technological progress has broaden the frequency range employed by communications and significantly increased the spectral efficiency, the traffic growth and the higher diversity of mobile services keep radio resource management (RRM) crucial.;Admission Control (AC) is an important mechanism for RRM. Despite the major boost that the study of AC techniques received within the context of the Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network BISDN, the specific features of mobile networks (spectrum limitations, stochastic behavior of the radio channel and especially terminal mobility) make the AC in such networks more complex. This work studies AC in connection with mobility: in order to admit a new session there must exist some guarantees---at least in a statistical sense---that there will be enough resources available to maintain the compromised Quality of Service (QoS) to all the ongoing sessions and to the new one. Such guarantee must be provided considering that during a session lifetime a mobile terminal can change its location and the required resources must be available wherever it goes to. Although this topic has drawn the attention of the research community for several years it is still alive since in order to meet the growing capacity demand there is a trend to reduce the cell size. Cell size reduction increases the handover frequency and also the number of handovers that a session must undergo and these, along with the higher diversity of services in next generation networks, have a negative impact on the efficiency of resource utilization. Hence, the interest of devising efficient RRM mechanisms grows accordingly.;This thesis aims at developing analytical models for the study and performance evaluation of RRM in mobile cellular networks. In a somewhat more specific manner this work pursues to contribute to the field by developing models, methods and algorithms to: study a family of algorithms that give priority to handover requests, analyze certain aspects related to the terminal sojourn in the handover area and its repercussions on the evaluation and design of RRM and study the AC from an optimization perspective.