Blocking effects of mobility and reservations in wireless networks

We evaluate the effects of mobility and reservations on new call blocking and handoff blocking in multirate wireless networks. The model evaluated uses fixed channel assignment (FCA) with priority for handoffs over new call arrivals by reserving a number of channels for handoff calls in all the cells. The performance measures used are new call blocking and handoff drop probabilities. The methodology used is that of implied costs which we calculate from the the network net revenue which considers the revenue generated by accepting a new call into the network as well as the cost of a handoff drop in any cell. Simulation and numerical results are presented showing the accuracy of the model. We present numerical results showing the effect of reservations on the call blocking probability. The implied cost analysis shows that mobility has a significant knock-on effect on the traffic elsewhere in the network and we capture this effect through the net revenue which is sensitive to the level of mobility. We calculate the sum revenue for a given network by maximizing the net revenue using implied costs in a gradient descent algorithm. This analysis indicates that in the case of multiple classes of traffic the call carrying capacity of the network is sensitive to the choice of reservation parameters.