Performance modeling of wireless networks with generally distributed handoff interarrival times

Handoff is an important issue in cellular mobile telephone systems. Recently, studies that question the validity of the assumption of handoff arrivals being Poissonian have appeared in the literature. The reasoning behind this claim can be summarized as follows: even if the new call arrival process is assumed to be Poisson, the handoff process due to dependencies with neighboring cells, call blocking and other reasons is not necessarily Poisson. The above-mentioned fact mandates the need to consider more general performance models that allow for arbitrarily distributed interarrival times. In this paper we provide numerical solutions for new and handoff call blocking probabilities with arbitrary handoff interarrival time distribution. For this purpose, we first prove that the underlying stochastic process is a Markov regenerative process and subsequently we use their mathematical theory to develop numerical techniques for important Quality of Service measures. Our results can be seen as a generalization of the recent work by Haring et al. [IEEE Trans. Vehi. Technol. 50 (2001) 664] where handoff traffic was assumed to form a Poisson process. Our work can be used for more accurate dimensioning of cellular systems with realistic traffic.