Mobile cellular telephony has grown quickly from a ground-breaking initiative (dating back to the start of the 80’s) to the way of life that is nowadays, with thousands of millions of user terminals worldwide. However, as with any wireless resource, the ranges of radio frequency spectrum assigned to that type of systems are limited. Therefore, this growth beyond all early forecasts makes the efficient management of the radio resource a major challenge for service providers. In addition, this management contributes to control the demands of a diversified traffic in continuous increase, as well as assures the viability and financial success of that kind of networks.

“Session Admission Control” (SAC) is a radio resource management mechanism useful for the design and operation of mobile cellular networks. The particular features of that sort of networks (scarcity and variability in the amount of resources and terminal mobility) are an added difficulty to the SAC. Specifically, mobility makes complex to probabilistically guarantee that a new session will have enough available resources in the visited cells during the session lifetime to meet the “Quality of Service” (QoS) requirements of that new session an all the ongoing sessions already present in the system.

Due to efficiency in the reuse of the radio frequency spectrum cellular fragmentation is increasing, and as a result, cell sizes are being reduced even more, producing a greater handover frequency. These, along with the disparity of QoS requirements, resource demands, and traffic profiles among the evolving next generation services, cause that in the absence of a suitable management mechanisms the network yields a poor utilization of the radio resources.

The work included in this thesis focuses on contributing in the characterization, understanding and development of mechanisms for the proper resource management in mobile cellular networks. Explicitly, this effort focuses on the development of models, algorithms and methods for studying the admission control from a stationary perspective, and the development of schemes able to optimize the behavior of the admission control in an adaptive way with respect to the nonstationary conditions of the real systems.