Micro/picocellular architectures for wireless networks have been proposed to provide higher capacity under limited radio spectrum. With smaller cell size, the frequency of hand-off events will increase. This will in turn increase the overheads for processing hand-off events. To reduce the overheads due to frequent hand-off, a cell-cluster concept has been proposed in [1]. In this paper, we propose a call admission control policy for cluster-based micro/picocellular wireless networks, that employs two levels of admission thresholds: one at the cell level and the other at the cluster level. An analytical method is developed to analyze the performance of the proposed policy. The analytical method is then applied to find the values of the admission thresholds such that the throughput of the network is maximized under the condition that a predetermined bound on the call hand-off dropping probability is guaranteed. Compared with call admission policies that employ a single threshold either at the cell level or at the cluster level under the condition that the policies provide the same predetermined maximum level of call hand-off dropping probability, the proposed call admission policy provides significantly better performance.

This paper proposes two topology discovery algorithms for IP networks, namely, a network layer topology discovery algorithm and a link layer topology discovery algorithm. The network layer topology discovery algorithm discovers the subnets and devices in the network of interest and the connections among them. The devices in a subnet can be found by a network layer topology discovery algorithm; however, the connections among the devices cannot be obtained. The link layer topology discovery algorithm is proposed to find the devices in a subnet and the connections among them. The two algorithm are integrated to find the detailed topology map of an IP network. The proposed topology discovery algorithms are implemented based on the Tcl/Tk and Scotty environment. Some implementation details are discussed.