An efficiency limit of cellular mobile systems

  • Authors:

  • A. G. Valkó;A. T. Campbell

  • Affiliations:

  • Ericsson Traffic Analysis and Network Performance Lab., H-1037 Budapest, Laborc u.l, Hungary;Center for Telecommunications Research, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

In order to limit handoff blocking probability, in cellular systems admission control can be applied to new call requests and resources reserved for future handoff attempts. Such resource reservation strategies have been widely studied in the literature. The denial of new call attempts, however, impacts system throughput creating a trade-off with handoff performance. The contribution of this paper is an analytical investigation of this trade-off. In particular, we study the impact of handoff on a cellular system's efficiency which we define as the system's throughput normalized by the theoretically optimal throughput at zero user mobility. As a reference case, we first determine the efficiency of a hypothetical system with deterministic advance reservation. Next, we consider systems with statistical reservation and calculate the maximum achievable efficiency, under the set of possible local admission control strategies subject to a hard constraint on the probability of call failure due to handoff blocking. Local admission control strategies are investigated because they represent efficient, yet simple strategies that lend themselves to easy implementation. We note that trunk reservation is a special case of local policies. We relate the calculated efficiency bound to call and mobility characteristics and show that the achievable efficiency decreases with decreasing cell size and with the increasing proportion of multimedia calls, both of which are recognized trends today.