FIXED AND ADAPTIVE BLOCKING THRESHOLDS IN CDMA CELLULAR NETWORKS

Recent papers have shown that, in a code-division multiple access cell ular network, bursty user mobility causes remarkable negative effects on link availability, and hence on cellular network capacity. This art icle shows that a possible provision for contrasting such negative eff ects is the introduction of a blocking threshold which produces an inc rease in the link availability and a decrease in the dropping probabil ity at the expense of the appearance of a non-null blocking probabilit y. In order to maximize the capacity of the cellular network, the bloc king threshold has to be selected so that a proper balancing of the bl ocking probability, dropping probability, and link availability is ach ieved. In particular, the article presents a simple self-adaptive mech anism for selecting the blocking threshold, which achieves good perfor mance and has the fundamental advantage of not requiring any a priori knowledge of the system parameters.