System and method of call admission control in a wireless network

1. A method of controlling call admissions in a communication network, comprising:

identifying a set of call classes for the communication network, wherein each class has a corresponding call arrival rate, revenue, and cost;

for each call class determining a corresponding profitability metric;

assigning a corresponding throttling fraction for each call class; and

allocating a call admission budget and defining an unallocated call admission budget as the allocated call admission budget minus a transformed throttling fraction of any class for which the transformed throttling fraction has been assigned, and wherein in descending order starting from the class having the highest profitability metric and proceeding through the class with the lowest profitability metric, the transformed throttling fraction for each class is determined as a minimum of unallocated call admission budget and the product of call arrival rate and cost for the corresponding class.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein each call class has a corresponding revenue metric per call and the profitability metric is the revenue metric divided by the corresponding cost.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the call arrival rate is a smoothed average call arrival rate.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein the call arrival rate is a historical metric.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein the act of assigning a corresponding throttling fraction τ i for each call class i includes the acts of

modeling the allocation of resources as a linear programming problem, in which the throttling fraction τ i for each call class i are decision variables of the linear programming problem, and wherein the linear programming problem is solved by transforming the throttling fractions to a transformed throttling fraction τ i * according to the equation

τ i * =λ i S i τ i

wherein λ i is an estimate of a call arrival rate for class i and S i is an estimate of cost to service a call in class i.