Soft and safe admission control in cellular networks

We study the mobile admission control problem in a cellular PCS network where transmitter powers are constrained and controlled by a distributed constrained power control (DCPC) algorithm. Receivers are subject to nonnegligible noise, and the DCPC attempts to bring each receiver's CIR (carrier-to-interference ratio) above a given quality target. Two classes of distributed admission controls are considered. One is a noninteractive admission control (N-IAC), where an admission decision is instantaneously made based on the system state. The other is an interactive admission control (IAC), under which the new mobile is permitted to interact with one or more potential channels before a decision is made. The algorithms are evaluated with respect to their execution time and their decision errors. Two types of errors are examined: type I error, where a new mobile is erroneously accepted and results an outage; and type II error, where a new mobile is erroneously rejected and results in blocking. The algorithms in the N-IAC class accept a new mobile if and only if the uplink and the downlink interferences are below certain corresponding thresholds. These algorithms are subject to errors of type I and type II. In the IAC class, we derive a soft and safe (SAS) admission algorithm, which is type I and type II error free, and protects the CIR's of all active links at any moment of time. A fast-SAS version, which is only type I error-free, is proposed for practical implementation, and is evaluated in several case studies. © 1997 IEEE.