Performance analysis of cellular mobile communication networks supporting multimedia services

This paper illustrates the development of an analytical model for a communi cation network providing integrated services to a population of mobile user s, and presents performance results to both validate the analytical approac h, and assess the quality of the services offered to the end users. The ana lytical model is based on continuous-time multidimensional birth-death proc esses, and is focused on just one of the cells in the network. The cellular system is assumed to provide three classes of service: the basic voice ser vice, a data service with bit rate higher than the voice service, and a mul timedia service with one voice and one data component. In order to improve the overall network performance, some channels can be reserved to handovers , and multimedia calls that cannot complete a handover are decoupled, by tr ansferring to the target cell only the voice component and suspending the d ata connection until a sufficient number of channels become free. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of the approximate model, as well as the effectiveness of the newly proposed multimedia call decoupling approach.