M. SALAMAH AND I. CANDAN
Computer Engineering Department, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagosa, K.K.T.C. -Mersin 10- TURKEY E-mail: {muhammed.salamah, idil.candan@emu.edu.tr }

This paper focuses on how to allocate bandwidth fairly for new and handoff calls in multimedia cellular networks. Most (if not all) of the proposed schemes in the literature give priority to handoff calls at the expense of blocking new calls and degrading channel utilization. We present a new bandwidth allocation scheme based on guard policy. Accordingly, new calls are blocked if the amount of occupied bandwidth is greater than a predefined bandwidth threshold. The scheme is based on monitoring the elapsed real time of handoff calls and according to both, a time threshold parameter, and the call type, handoff calls are either prioritized or treated as new calls. Also in this paper, we introduce a crucial general performance metric Z that can be used to measure the performance of different bandwidth allocation schemes and compare them. Z, which is a performance/cost ratio, is a function of the new call blocking probability, handoff call dropping probability and system utilization all together. Simulation results show that, our scheme outperforms other traditional schemes in terms of performance/cost ratio, and maintains its superiority under different network circumstances.