The Impact of Mobility on Cellular Network Configuration

This paper proposes a model for configuring cellular networks to study the dynamics of mobility between a single cell and its adjacent cells. It differs from most models considered in the literature by explicitly incorporating the dependency between the handoff rate and the system state. Besides, the handoff rate is also a function of cell size and subscriber mobility. Extensive computational experiments were done to study the impact of various input parameters on specific performance measures. Several observations are made regarding the system performance and as to how they are affected by the complex interaction between subscriber mobility, cell size, number of channels and the mean call initiation rate. The results of these experiments show that the proposed model, where handoff rates are state-dependent, captures additional traffic due to mobility when compared to the traditional method of modeling handoffs using information about the average behavior. Finally, the economic impact of mobility on system configuration decisions is analyzed. Though an approximation, the above work provides interesting insights about the impact of mobility in configuring cellular networks.