Estimation of performance measures for product form cellular mobile communications networks

This paper investigates cellular mobile communications networks. The purpos e of the paper is twofold. First, it is shown that the restrictive assumpti on of reversible routing is not required for the network population distrib ution to be of product form. Different protocols with their specific ways o f handling congestion, all of them yielding product form, are discussed. Se cond, the notoriously difficult task of obtaining performance measures deri ved from product form expressions is attacked by an efficient method based on importance sampling. This algorithm substantially speeds up the computat ional time required to estimate, for example, the probability that a call a ttempting a hand-over is blocked. In addition, qualitative insight is gaine d into the network conditional on blocking in a specific cell: are neighbou ring cells overloaded as well? The examples include networks with capacity constraints due to effective interference between cells, and a reasonably s ized network containing 49 cells and 7 cell reuse groups.