General packet radio service (GPRS) uses a two-stage mechanism to allocate uplink radio resource to mobile stations (MSs). In stage-1, the base station (BS) assigns several packet data channels (PDCHs) to an MS. Furthermore, a PDCH may be assigned to multiple MSs. In stage-2, therefore, the BS selects one of the multiplexed MSs in a PDCH to use the radio resource. In this paper, maintaining a load balance between PDCHs in stage-1 is examined and several selection schemes to lower the mis-selection rate in stage-2 are proposed. From our simulation results, the cost deduced from the poor load balancing and selection schemes render a lower system throughput and a non-negligible increase in packet queuing delay. Among the various stage-2 selection policies, round robin with linearly-accumulated adjustment (RRLAA) has the lowest mis-selection rate and outperforms the one without any heuristic by up to 50%.

The Quality of Service (QoS) reservations in Differentiated Service (DiffServ) networks can be classified into two sets: Book-ahead (BA) requests and Instantaneous Requests (IRs). When an admitted BA request becomes active, some ongoing IRs is dropped when the bandwidth is insufficient for supporting both IRs and BA requests. The admission control should predict the lifetime, i.e. look-ahead time, of the IRs to prevent the admitted IRs from being dropped. The control should then check whether the available bandwidth during the look-ahead time is sufficient for the incoming IRs. We propose an application-aware look-ahead admission control for IRs, which determines the look-ahead time for specific types of IR applications. An admitted BA request might block subsequent ones that could bring more effective revenue. Thus, we propose the deferrable model of the admission control for BA requests. Simulation results indicate that the application-aware look-ahead admission control successfully reduces the dropping probability and wasted revenue of IRs by up to 10 times and 30%, respectively. Besides, the deferrable model indeed results in more BA effective revenue.