Traffic performance analysis for cellular communication systems with mixed platform types and queued hand-offs

Cellular communication systems that support a mixture of platform types and queuing of hand-off calls are considered. In pure loss systems, if there are no channels available at the target gateway, the hand-off attempt fails and the call is forced to terminate. In delay systems, however, hand-off calls can be held in queue while the supporting mobile is within a transition region where acceptable performance can be provided by at least two different gateways (base stations). When only a finite number of hand-off calls can be queued, mixed delay/loss configurations arise. An analytical tractable model is developed to predict communications traffic performance in such systems. A suitable state characterization is identified which allows the problem to be formulated within the framework of multi-dimensional birth-death processes. The authors extend this approach and demonstrate how delay and combined delay/loss systems can be considered within the analytical framework that is being developed.