In recent years, there has been a rapid evolution and deployment of wireless networks. In populated areas, high-rate data access is enabled anywhere and anytime with the pervasive wireless infrastructure such as the fourth-generation (4G) cellular systems, IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs), and IEEE 802.16-based wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs). In such a heterogeneous wireless access medium, multi-radio devices become a trend for users to conveniently explore various services offered by different wireless systems. This thesis presents radio resource management mechanisms, for bandwidth allocation, call admission control (CAC), and mobile terminal (MT) energy management, that can efficiently exploit the available resources in the heterogeneous wireless medium and enhance the user perceived quality-of-service (QoS).Almost all existing studies on heterogeneous networking are limited to the traditional centralized infrastructure, which is inflexible in dealing with practical scenarios, especially when different networks are operated by different service providers. In addition, in most current wireless networks, mobile users are simply viewed as service recipients in network operation, with passive transceivers completely or partially under the control of base stations or access points. In this thesis, we present efficient decentralized bandwidth allocation and CAC mechanisms that can support single-network and multi-homing calls. The decentralized architecture gives an active role to the MT in the resource management operation. Specifically, an MT with single-network call can select the best wireless network available at its location, while an MT with multi-homing call can determine a required bandwidth share from each network to satisfy its total required bandwidth. The proposed mechanisms rely on cooperative networking and offer a desirable flexibility between performance measures (in terms of the allocated bandwidth per call and the call blocking probability), and between the performance and the implementation complexity.With the increasing gap between the MT demand for energy and the offered battery capacity, service degradation is expected if the MT cannot efficiently manage its energy consumption. Specifically, for an uplink multi-homing video transmission, the existing studies do not guarantee that the MT available energy can support the entire call, given the battery energy limitation. In addition, the energy management mechanism should take account of video packet characteristics, in terms of packet distortion impact, delay deadline, and precedence constraint, and employ the available resources in the heterogeneous wireless medium. In this thesis, we present MT energy management mechanisms that can support a target call duration, with a video quality subject to the MT battery energy limitation. In addition, we present a statistical guarantee framework that can support a consistent video quality for the target call duration with minimum power consumption.
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