RESOURCE MANAGEMENT IN DS-CDMA CELLULAR

NETWORKS
JIHUI ZHANG∗ , CHONGGANG WANG† , AND BO LI‡

Abstract. Direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) has been shown as the
predominant access technology to provide high speed multimedia services in the next generation
wireless cellular networks. The DS-CDMA cellular network significantly differentiates itself from
the traditional narrowband TDMA/FDMA system, in which great capacity gain could potentially
be achieved by taking advantage of its unique characteristics. This chapter addresses the resource
management issues in DS-CDMA cellular networks. We first provide an overview of the DS-CDMA
network and discuss the main challenges in the design of resource management schemes. We then
examine several critical issues within the scope of resource management including congestion control,
rate and power control, cell planning; and in particular with emphasis on call admission control.
In addition, we also offer some insight and discussions on the performance aspects, strength and
weakness of the existing proposals.

Key words. resource management, call admission control, DS-CDMA

1. Introduction. With the rapid development and the continuous expansions

of mobile communications, and the explosive growth in the demand for new wireless
cellular services, it is expected that the next generation wireless cellular networks
will eventually support a wide variety of services including voice, video, images, data
or combination of these. Direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA)
has emerged as the predominant wireless access technology to provide high speed
multimedia services used in both wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA)
and cdma2000. For example, in WCDMA networks, the air interface using a 5MHz
bandwidth per carrier and 3.84Mcps high chip rate can provide increased processing
gain and higher receiver multipath resolution, which enables the possibility of effective
RAKE receiver and offers flexible wideband services such as wireless Internet services
with the peak rate of 384 kb/s and video transmissions with data rate up to 2 Mb/s
[8].
Great capacity gain and flexibility can be achieved with the deployment of DS-
CDMA radio interface. In narrowband systems with fixed channel allocation, the
capacity for each cell is time-invariant based on the specified frequency reuse pattern
ensuring the co-channel interference level [15]. In DS-CDMA systems, all cells share
the total frequency band and the cell capacity is interference limited. The capacity in
DS-CDMA system depends on the instantaneous traffic conditions in both home and
surrounding cells, while the transmission quality of wireless channels can be expressed
in term of the signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) by taking into account both the in-cell
and out-cell interferences. Because of this unique interference-limited ”soft” capacity
nature of the DS-CDMA system, mechanisms such as adaptive antenna arrays and
voice activity factor could be effectively applied to improve the system capacity [1].
Despite considerable efforts and progress made in DS-CDMA systems, the accommo-
dation of multimedia services still poses a great deal of challenges. To fully utilize the

∗ Computer Science Department, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong

Kong.
† Special Research Center for Optical Internet and Wireless Information Networks (COIWIN),

School of Communication and Information Engineering, ChongQing University of Posts and Telecom-
munications (CQUPT), Chongqing, China.
‡ Computer Science Department, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong

Kong. Fax:+852 23581477. E-mail:bli@cs.ust.hk.

1
2 Jihui Zhang , Chonggang Wang and Bo Li

scarce resources and at the same time provide necessary QoS guarantee for a variety of
services, it is of great importance to design effective resource management strategies.
Resource management in general contains a wide scope of aspects including chan-
nel configuration, power control, connection mobility management and load balance,
and etc. Specifically, channel configuration comprises of basic channel configura-
tion (QoS requesting and QoS mapping), dynamic channel configuration (to realize
bandwidth on demand for best-effort traffic), and code resource management (to use
orthogonal codes at best, to improve code utility, to lower inter-channel interfer-
ence, or to improve system capacity). Power control, including open-loop control and
closed-loop control, is basically utilized to overcome ”near-far” problem and shadow-
ing attenuation. Connection mobility management mainly deals with how to effec-
tively choose handoff scheme for different types of traffics. Furthermore, load balance
can be obtained through call admission control (CAC), packet scheduling, congestion
control, cell planning and etc. Resource management generally aims to guarantee the
requested QoS, improve system capacity and enlarge the coverage of base stations,
while keeping cost as low as possible. An comprehensive illustration on the resource
management process can be diagrammed as Fig. 1.1.

CRM
RAB QoS request Resource reclaimed

BCC
RAB QoS mapping Session finished

CAC CMM & PS Handoff and/or

Admission control
& CC Packet transmission

Code request and CRM DCC

Vary rate of session
allocation

CL-PC
Access layer configured Power control

OL-PC
Channel setup Session beginning

RAB: Radio Access Bearer OL-PC: Open-Lop Power Control

BCC: Basic Channel Configuration CL-PC: Closed-Loop Power Control
CRM: Code Resource Management CMM: Connection Mobility Management
DCC: Dynamic Channel Configuration PS: Packet Scheduling
CAC: Call Admission Control CC: Congestion Control

Fig. 1.1. RRM in the process of a session

This chapter will mainly focus on some of the important issues in resource man-
agement, such as call admission control, congestion control, power and rate allocation,
and cell planning for the DS-CDMA wireless cellular network. To put it into more
detail, call admission control devotes to the design of efficient admission algorithms at
 Resource Management in DS-CDMA Cellular Networks 3

call arrivals; congestion control tries to avoid or relieve the congestion status through-
out the system; efficient allocation on the power and rate may optimize system perfor-
mance under the given system state; cell planning includes the network construction
considerations, such as bandwidth allocation between two links with adaptation to
the traffic asymmetry; base station location and density planning to minimize the
system cost; pilot power control for proper cell coverage; and optimal cell sectoring
issue as to determine the directivity and width of the sectors.
In this chapter, we start by describing the general concepts in DS-CDMA network,
in particular capacity constraint in Section 2, and discuss the main challenges in
Section 3. We then closely examine several critical issues in resource management
including congestion control, rate and power control and cell planning in Section 4.
We study the call admission control in Section 5, and Section 6 concludes the chapter.
2. Capacity in DS-CDMA. Before we go into the resource management schemes,
we’d better have a close look at the capacity provisioning in DS-CDMA systems first.
In the DS-CDMA cellular networks, all users use the same total frequency band for
transmissions. Each user is assigned one or more distinct spreading codes and all the
codes generally bear noise like characteristics with very small cross-correlation to each
other. The quality of communication is primarily determined by the detected signal-
to-interference ratio (SIR) level at the receiver, with the generally accepted measure-
ment on the bit energy-to-noise density ratio (Eb /N0 ), expressed as SIR = IPNt/W /R
,
where R is the base-band information bit rate, W is the total radio frequency band for
transmission, thus the corresponding spreading gain is G = W/R; Pt is the received
signal power for the considered spreading code and IN denotes the total detected
interference at the receiver. In order to guarantee the transmission quality for the
considered service, the SIR needs to be maintained above a certain threshold.
To achieve higher system capacity, the multiple access interference (MAI) needs
to be reduced. There are two techniques commonly applied [1]: 1) the cell sectoriza-
tion, which deploys directional antenna arrays at the base station and splits cell into
different sectors. Generally speaking, only signals from the users within a sector are
received at the corresponding antenna array, thus the number of users that a cell can
serve could be increased approximately by the same factor as the number of sectors;
2) the voice activity factor, which can be used to switch off the signal transmission
when the user is not active, thus reducing the interference.
In order to accommodate high speed multimedia services and to support vari-
able rate transmissions, two mechanisms can be used: Multi-code (MC) and Variable
Spreading Factor (VSF) [14]. In MC-CDMA system, all data signals over the radio
interface are transmitted at a basic rate and the spreading processing gain over each
code channel is a constant. Multiple orthogonal spreading codes are transmitted si-
multaneously for a high speed application. For VSF transmission, each user transmits
over one single code channel. Higher transmission rate is provided with a spreading
factor that varies inversely with the desired data rate. In VSF-CDMA systems, users
are assigned different power levels based on their data rates and quality of service
(QoS) requirements. The two mechanisms provide comparable performance in high
speed transmission, thus both are commonly deployed in DS-CDMA systems.
For capacity calculation, since the uplink and downlink generally use different
bandwidth regions for transmission, they are usually considered separately. Refer to
Fig.2.1, in the uplink, the received signal power at BS0 from a specific user MSj is its
transmitted power Sj multiplied by the pass loss Lj ; the corresponding interference
is the received power from other active users, both within the reference cell (e.g. MSi )
4 Jihui Zhang , Chonggang Wang and Bo Li

Reference Cell Out Cell

Li Lk
BS0 BS1

Lj
L1
Power Pt,0 Power Pt,1
MSi
Power Si MSk
MSj Power Sk
Power Sj

Fig. 2.1. SIR model for DS-CDMA cellular system.

and out cells (e.g. MSk ), plus the background thermal noise [15]. The capacity in the
uplink is calculated as the maximum number of users that could be admitted while
ensuring the SIR requirement for each user in the reference cell. In the downlink,
a fraction of total transmitted power at the base station is dedicated to the control
channel and all traffic channels share the remaining power. As shown in Fig. 2.1, the
reference cell BS0 allocates a fraction of its traffic channel power to any in-cell user,
e.g. MSi ; the remaining power received at MSi from its home base station BS0 and other
base stations, such as BS1 , will appear as interference. The capacity in the downlink is
defined as the maximum number of users that could be admitted with the constraint
that the transmission quality of each user, in terms of SIR threshold, is guaranteed
and the total required power does not exceed the maximum power constraint at the
base station.

3. Challenges in resource management. The accommodation of multime-

dia services with different QoS requirements poses many new challenges in the design
of resource management strategies, such as how to efficiently allocate the available
resources to optimize channel utilization; how to adjust the service rate to relieve
the congestion or accommodate more traffic; how to maintain the diverse QoS re-
quirements; and how to provide priorities among different services. There are also
several distinctive characteristics for the DS-CDMA system which can be explored
to achieve better performance. For example, the universal frequency usage enables
more efficient resource provisioning; proper rate and power allocation helps to re-
duce the interference, thus providing higher capacity. On the other hand, these may
inevitably increase the complexity on system design. In this section, we look into
some of the issues including universal frequency reuse among cells, power control, soft
handoff, voice activity factor, path loss model for a DS-CDMA system, and discuss
the corresponding impact on resource management design.

3.1. Universal frequency reuse. The universal frequency reuse of a DS-CDMA

system allows all cells to share the same wide frequency band. This reduces the com-
plexity in cell planning on co-channel bandwidth allocation and potentially leads to
higher capacity gain for a cell under asymmetric loadings. Nevertheless, this increases
the dependency among different cells and incurs significant difficulty in resource man-
 Resource Management in DS-CDMA Cellular Networks 5

agement, as more frequent coordination is required. Furthermore, because of the

universal frequency reuse with interference-limited transmission, even if the cell oc-
cupancy information can be obtained, the outage, i.e., the received SIR level for an
existing connection drops below the threshold level, may still occur due to the user
mobility, propagation variation, voice activity and etc. As a result, this requires more
precise control and finer tuning in resource management.

3.2. Power control. Power control in DS-CDMA systems helps to reduce exces-
sive interference throughout the system and prolong the battery life. Most existing
work assume perfect power control, i.e. in the uplink, to overcome the ”near-far”
problem [15], the received power from all users in the reference cell are set to be
equal; in the downlink, the assigned power to each user is adjusted to achieve exactly
the required SIR level. In practical systems, power control imperfection may occur
occasionally and cause some mis-adjustment on the received power. As a result, the
received power level of both the required signal and the interference might vary over
time. This in turn exerts additional difficulty on the power allocation and adjust-
ment, and requires the resource management strategies to incorporate more accurate
estimation on the power control imperfection.

3.3. Soft handoff. Soft handoff denotes the state where a mobile transmits to
and receives from more than one base station simultaneously. On the downlink, the
mobile combines the signals from the connecting base stations and adds the different
multipaths to reinforce the received signal, which leads to improved communications
quality. On the uplink, the neighboring base stations independently decode the sig-
nals received and the best replica will be selected. Soft handoff ensures smoother
user communications, better communication quality during handoffs and larger cell
coverage in DS-CDMA systems [13]. The tradeoff lies in the higher complexity and
additional network resources required. As a result, soft handoff may greatly impact
the resource management design. For example, as longer handoff transfer delay gener-
ally allowed, it is possible for handoff traffics to be queued. Furthermore, as more base
stations involved in the communication with one mobile user, power transmission and
allocation should be carefully adjusted to maximize utilization and avoid unnecessary
interference in the system.

3.4. Voice activity. In DS-CDMA systems, cell capacity is mainly limited by

the interference from simultaneous transmissions. In such a case, the voice activity
factor might be incorporated into the system design and the spectrum utilization can
be significantly improved by shutting down the MSs during their periods of silence. As
a result, the system does not always need to provide full bandwidth to the admitted
calls as long as their received SIR levels during active period exceeds the required
threshold. However, with the partial bandwidth allocation, high outage probability
could occur occasionally in case that most of the users are actively transmitting. The
additional capacity gain should be well justified to maintain the required QoS, and
congestion control is needed to combat with the greater varying system behavior.

3.5. Propagation model. Generally speaking, the propagation model might

change greatly in a variety of environments and/or during different time intervals.
This imposes great difficulty as well as new chance on system management. For
example, under severe channel conditions, greater power should be allocated to com-
pensate the path loss factor; however, this may cause over-provisioning on system
resources and incur additional interference to others in better channel conditions. On
6 Jihui Zhang , Chonggang Wang and Bo Li

the other hand, by precisely tracking the channel fluctuations and scheduling trans-
missions when the corresponding channel quality is near the peak, such diversity gain
might help to improve performance in terms of higher system throughput and lower
inter- and intra-cell interference [21]. Therefore, precise loss model and accordingly
better resource management strategies should be designed to properly utilize the sys-
tem resources.
The issues discussed in this section pose considerable difficulties as well as op-
portunities for the resource management in DS-CDMA systems. The challenge is to
design an effective resource management policy, which may accurately reflect the sys-
tem behavior and optimize network performance by taking advantages of the unique
characteristics of the DS-CDMA system.
4. Resource management issues. Resource management is a large scope con-
cept. In this section, we investigate some of the major aspects, including the con-
gestion control, power and rate allocation, and cell planning. Furthermore, the cell
planning considers the bandwidth allocation, base station planning, pilot power con-
trol and cell sectorization. We leave the detailed discussion on call admission control
in Section 5.
4.1. Congestion control. When the system fails to find a set of power trans-
mission levels to satisfy the users’ quality of service requirement, congestion happens.
Even if call admission control is deployed, congestion may still occur due to some
other factors such as the deterioration of wireless environment, mobility of users,
users’ activity and power control imperfection. As a result, transmitted power and
cell interference level tend to increase and outage occurs. This incurs traffic loss and
delay jitter, thus deteriorates the transmission quality. Generally speaking, when con-
gestion occurs, three main mechanisms can be applied to relieve the congestion: 1)
to drop some on-going calls. Then the question is which set of calls to drop? The
system may choose to drop call(s) in outage condition, or to drop each existing call
with pre-specified probability, or to drop call(s) that make the largest contribution to
alleviate the congestion. The last scheme offers the best performance with the highest
complexity [11]; 2) to decrease transmission rate. This could be done by either pro-
portionally reducing the transmission rate of each user or decreasing the rates to the
same maximal fair SIR level [20]; 3) to reduce the number of simultaneous transmis-
sions [5]. The transmission probability can be dynamically adjusted according to the
occupancy information. To eliminate the randomness and to obtain full control over
the simultaneous transmissions, cells may sequentially schedule active transmitting
periods for each data service.
To conclude, dropping on-going calls is the most straightforward way to relieve
the congestion, however it is undesirable and often unbearable from users’ point of
view. As mentioned in [9], to simultaneously reduce the data rate of all data services
yields lower throughput than to support fewer users with full rates at the same time.
Thus, decreasing data rate obtains sub-optimal system utilization. On the other hand,
switching off some users could lead to extra transmission jitter and delay. All these
tradeoffs need careful examination.
4.2. Power and rate allocation. Provided with the system parameters such
as cell occupancy and channel conditions, it is important to optimize the system per-
formance by efficient allocation of transmission rate and power. A variety of criteria
might be optimized, such as to minimize the emitted power, which reduces the battery
consumption and causes less interferences; or to maximize transmission rate, which
 Resource Management in DS-CDMA Cellular Networks 7

indicates the maximized system throughput and resource utilization. A power and
rate allocation scheme was proposed for the downlink in [7] with the objective of
maximizing the total number of frames transmitted during a control interval under
the SIR constraint for each service type and the average transmission power limit
among all base stations. The basic implication is that if a mobile experiences poor
channel condition, the assigned transmission rate for this mobile should be low. The
optimal allocation was formulated and solution was obtained through the exhaustive
search, with exponential complexity and the degraded fairness. To cope with these
two disadvantages, suboptimal algorithms were proposed in which the rate allocation
depends on the interference distribution and the power allocation depends on the
traffic distribution among the cells. For the uplink [19], the optimization was formu-
lated to maximize the total normalized transmission rate subject to the constraint
on transmission power and maximum allowed rate. The optimal solution yielded not
only higher throughput but also significant power savings. However, this can poten-
tially lead to starvation for users with poor channel condition, since users with better
channel condition will always transmit first.

4.3. Cell planning. In order to reduce the system cost and maximize the uti-
lization of scarce resources, efficient cell planning is of vital importance for service
providers. Generally speaking, cell planning consists of a number of issues, such as
bandwidth allocations, base station planning, pilot power control and cell sectoriza-
tion. We next discuss each of them in some detail.
• Bandwidth allocations in uplinks and downlinks
In most systems, uplink and downlink use different bandwidth regions for
transmission and the bandwidth allocation between the two links is sym-
metric. However, with the accommodation of multimedia services, greater
amount of radio resources are required on the downlink over uplink. To cope
with the traffic asymmetry, unbalanced bandwidth allocation is preferred and
great system performance gain may be achieved by the proper assignment of
bandwidth between two links according to the traffic requirements.
• Base station planning
Since the overall frequency band is shared by all active users and the capac-
ity of each cell depends on the interference levels, proper planning of base
station locations should consider not only the cell coverage but also some
other factors, such as the amount of resources available, estimated traffic dis-
tribution in the area and the radio channel propagation models. The main
purpose of base station planning is to select the sites for base stations by
taking into account the system cost, transmission quality, service coverage
and etc. The optimal location of new base stations to minimize a linear com-
bination of installation cost and total transmitted power was investigated in
[16] by taking into account traffic distribution, SIR requirements, power allo-
cation constraints and power control mechanisms. More complex models also
exist with considerations on stochastic behavior of the system, or/and soft
handoff. The optimal base station density was examined in [18] considering
power control, macroscopic selection diversity and propagation model.
• Pilot power control
To select the proper base station to connect, mobile users need to measure
and report the Eb /N0 level of the received pilot power to the base stations.
The pilot power determines the cell coverage area and the average number of
users within a cell. Increasing the pilot-signal power of a base station expands
8 Jihui Zhang , Chonggang Wang and Bo Li

the coverage area of the cell, thereby increasing the number of users in the
serving cell but resulting in higher intra-cell interference. On the other side,
it may decrease the number of users in adjacent cells with decreased inter-cell
interference. Efficient pilot power control needs to balance the cell load and
cell coverage area among neighboring cells, whose objectives are to reduce
the variation of interference, stabilize the network operation, and improve
cell capacity and communication quality especially under non-uniform traffic
loading among the cells.
• Cell sectorization
Traditional sectoring approaches divide the cell into equal-width sectors,
which has been shown to provide the same fold capacity gain under highly uni-
form traffic load [1]. However, for the system with ”hot-spot” traffic, sectors
with high-density traffic suffer high outage probability. Adaptive cell sector-
ing could be deployed at the base station to greatly improve the performance
in such a system. In [10], the optimal cell sectoring (OS) with the objective
of minimizing the total transmission power was formulated and the solution
was obtained using the well-known Dijkstra’s algorithm. The directivity and
width of the sectors can also be adjusted according to the geographic dis-
tribution of traffic. With the observation that the sector boundaries should
across some low-density regions in order to minimize the oscillations and the
objective of lower computational complexity, the authors in [17] proposed
a cluster-based sectoring (CS) algorithm. The complexity of CS is much
lower than OS algorithm, without any significant degradation on the sys-
tem performance. Specifically under the user distribution and sectoring for
OS and CS shown in Fig. 4.1, the CS algorithm reduces the complexity of
OS algorithm by 85% with only 1% increase of the total transmitted power.
Furthermore, we can observe that sector boundaries are generally crossing
low-density regions in the CS solution; while in OS, they may pass through
two users very close to each other. It is expected that dynamic cell sectoring
could be designed to incorporate the stochastic nature of the system, such as
user mobility, channel fading, power control and sectorization imperfection
into consideration, to better adapt to the real system.

36 users, 6 sectors
Dashed lines: sectoring boundaries for OS
Solid lines: sectoring boundaries for CS
Red ellipse: one of the clusters.

Fig. 4.1. User distribution and cell sectoring

5. Call admission control. Call admission control is one of the most important
elements in the resource management, which determines whether to admit or reject
a call upon its arrival. The objective is to maximize the utilization of resources by
 Resource Management in DS-CDMA Cellular Networks 9

admitting as many new calls as possible while maintaining the fairness and QoS of
on-going calls. There are many call admission control schemes proposed in literature,
most of which can be classified into the following three categories: number-based, SIR-
based or interference-based call admission control. In this section, we will introduce
them in detail.
5.1. Number-based call admission control. In the number-based call ad-
mission control [2], the QoS requirement, in term of the upper bound on packet error
probability is mapped into the maximum number of voice/data calls that can be
simultaneously accommodated in the system, denoted by Kv /Kd . To reflect the ca-
pability that voice calls can tolerate higher bit error rates, Kv is set greater than Kd .
As shown in Fig. 5.1, the admission of voice calls depends on a threshold value Tv
and new data arrival either joins the backlog pool or is discarded if the pool is full.
To provide priority to voice calls, the admission threshold Tv can be set equal to Kv ,
i.e. admit as many voice calls as the system can support. Some fairness can be offered
to data traffic by setting Tv less than Kv , taking into account the number of back-
logged data packets. At any time slot t, voice calls can transmit without delay and
the backlogged data packets occupy the silence period of voice calls for transmission
with probability Pt . Pt is calculated according to a function with the parameters on
maximum allowed simultaneous data transmissions Kd , the current active voice calls
and the number of backlogged data packets obtained from the system feedback at the
beginning of each time slot.

Kv Max Simultaneous Voice

Set Kv, Kd
Kd Max Simultaneous Data
Kv>Kd
Tv Threshold for Voice Admission
Nv Number of Voice in Cell
Pt Data Transmission Probability
f() Function Based on Occupancy and Kd

Set Tv In Time Slot t

Tv<=Kv
Voice Transmission
Without Delay
NO
Feedback On
Occupancy

Calculate
Data Call Request? Pt=f(feedback, Kd)

Put in Backlog Voice

Pool Backlogged Data
Transmission with
Probability Pt
Nv<Tv
Yes
No

Transmission

Reject Voice Admit Voice

Admission

Fig. 5.1. Number-based Admission Control

10 Jihui Zhang , Chonggang Wang and Bo Li

Based on the time-invariant cell capacity assumption, the operation for the number-
based call admission strategies is very similar to those in the narrowband systems, in
which call admission is based only on the current cell loading. Such a scheme is simple
for implementation and analysis. However, in DS-CDMA system, the capacity varies
with the interference level, and the number-based schemes completely ignore the soft
nature of DS-CDMA capacity, so the control is generally inaccurate and non-adaptive.
5.2. Interference-based call admission. In DS-CDMA cellular networks, all
users share the same wide frequency band. When a call (MS Arrival) is admitted into
a cell, it transmits to and receives information from the corresponding base station
(BS0) (see Fig. 5.2). In the uplink, the transmitted power from MS Arrival increases
interference level on other in-cell (MS In) and out-cell (MS Out) users’ receivers at
their base stations BS0 and BS1. In the down link, the power allocated from BS0 to
MS Arrival causes additional interference for all other users (MS In and MS Out) in
the system. The interference level depends heavily on the overall system parameters.
As a result, the admission of a new call can gracefully degrade the performance of
all users currently in service. Accordingly, in DS-CDMA system, the number of calls
that can be admitted in a cell is not a fixed value. A more reasonable measurement
is the received interference power at the BSs.
An admission control scheme based on the received interference at the base sta-
tions is proposed in [6] for the uplink DS-CDMA system. Three interference margins
are defined: the total interference margin (TIM), the current interference margin (CIM)
and handoff interference margin (HIM). Here, TIM is the maximum acceptable link in-
terference such that the QoS in term of lower bound Eb /N0 is guaranteed; CIM is
the estimated interference level taking into account the assignment of the channel to
the newly arrived call; HIM is the interference estimation by further considering the
reserved channels for handoff calls. The BS interprets the current interference from
the measured power strength and calculates CIM and HIM accordingly. If there is a
call request and HIM<TIM, i.e., handoff arrival can be safely reserved, then the call
will be admitted. Otherwise, the base station will check whether it is a handoff call
and CIM<TIM. If so, the base station will assign a new channel for the handoff call;
otherwise the call will be rejected. Compared with the number-based schemes, the
interference-based call admission control better represents the inherently interference-
limited nature of DS-CDMA systems at the expense of extra complexity in the inter-
ference detection.
5.3. SIR-based call admission control. Admission control based on the up-
link SIR requirements is firstly proposed in [3]. A crucial measurement, namely resid-
ual capacity, is defined as the additional number of calls that can be accepted by a
base station so that the system-wide outage probability will not exceed a pre-defined
SIR level. In the localized algorithm, the residual capacity is calculated solely based
on the SIR measurement at the local base station and a call will not be admitted
unless the residual capacity is greater than zero. In the global algorithm, all adjacent
cells’ SIR levels and residual capacities will be calculated upon a call admission. A
call is accepted if and only if the minimum of all cells’ residual capacity is greater than
zero. This ensures that the admission of the new call will not affect the QoS in all
surrounding cells, which is particularly important under non-uniform traffic scenario.
This work is extended to support multimedia services in [4], where uplink and down-
link were considered separately. The average SIR level for each call class is measured
periodically for both links. Accordingly, for each class i, the system estimates the ex-
pected SIRi,j upon a class j call arrival. Distinct admission thresholds Γi,j are settled
 Resource Management in DS-CDMA Cellular Networks 11

MS_Arrival: Call Arrival

MS_In: In_cell Current Served Call
MS_Out: Out_cell On-going Call
BS0: Served Base Station
BS1: Other Base Station
Controlled Transmission Power
Interference for Others

MS_Out

BS1

Interference for
Out_Cell Users

MS_Arrival
MS_In Interference for
Other In_Cell Users

BS0
Uplink

BS1

MS_In

MS_Out
Additional
Interference for
Out_Cell Users

BS0
Interference for
Additional Downlink
Interference for In_cell users
Other In_Cell Users
MS_Arrival

Fig. 5.2. MS admission

for admission if SIRi,j ≥ Γi,j , for all call classes. Priority is provided for handoff calls
by setting a higher SIR threshold for new arrivals.
To adapt to the changing system conditions and to guarantee the long-term trans-
mission quality, an admission control scheme for the downlink MC-CDMA system to
support multiple classes of traffic with diverse SIR requirements is proposed in [12],
as with more widely deployment of multimedia services, the downlink may become
the bottleneck of the system. The lower-bound SIR requirements for multiple service
types are formulated, incorporating the statistical factors such as voice activity and
log-normal shadowing in propagation. The long-term outage probability is calculated
and the capacity constraints are derived by the Gaussian approximation. Reserva-
tion based on an iteratively estimated handoff arrival rate was performed to provide
priority support for handoff traffic, and thus lower dropping probability for handoff
calls was obtained. The long-term outage probability is kept at a pre-required level
to ensure more stable system performance and at the same time, gain better system
utilization with QoS guarantee.
In conclusion, the number-based call admission control assumes a time-invariant
12 Jihui Zhang , Chonggang Wang and Bo Li

cell capacity and is simple for implementation and analysis. However, it does not
consider the inherent soft capacity nature of DS-CDMA system and could lead to
inaccurate results. On the other hand, the SIR-based schemes best characterize the
transmission quality and also offers the QoS guarantee. But the varying system
environment poses considerable difficulty in the system design and measurements.
The interference-based call admission control also considers the interference limited
nature of the system. The trade-off lies in the simpler implementation for the coarse
measurements on the quality of services.

6. Conclusion. Direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) has

been shown as the predominant radio access technology to provide high speed multi-
media support in the next generation wireless cellular networks. The DS-CDMA cel-
lular system significantly differentiates itself from the traditional narrowband TDMA/
FDMA systems, in which great capacity gain could potentially be achieved by taking
advantage of its unique characteristics. There are also new challenges for the system
design, and in particular for resource management. In this chapter, we discuss several
critical issues in the resource management including call admission control, conges-
tion control, rate and power allocation, and cell planning. In general, the issues in the
resource management are closely related. A cell planning strategy that adapts well to
the traffic distribution and channel condition helps the design of call admission control
schemes. Better call admission policy can alleviate the pressure on congestion control
mechanism. Furthermore, an efficient rate and power allocation could be applied to
achieve optimized system performance. Perhaps greater challenges exist in the seam-
less integration of the different elements in real systems and adequate adaptation to
the stochastic behavior of the system such as user mobility, air-interface condition
variation, voice activity factors, power control imperfection and the traffic condition.

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