TRAFFIC ENGINEERING OF THE RADIO INTERFACE FOR CELLULAR MOBILE NETWORKS

This paper reviews traffic-related issues in the operation of the radi o interface in cellular mobile networks operating with FDMA, TDMA, or CDMA technology. The emphasis is on issues which affect the traffic pe rformance of the network, rather than on transmission technology, or t ransmission quality measures such as bit error rate. We review the imp ortant traffic performance measures for cellular systems and the issue s of channel assignment, handoff, access control, traffic modeling, an d traffic management. Traffic modeling for all types of networks is co nsidered in some depth, both by drawing analogies with fixed-wire netw orks, and by considering cellular-specific modeling. From the modeling results, we conclude that reuse-based networks such as FDMA and TDMA possess quite different traffic characteristics from CDMA networks.