Performance analysis of cellular mobile communication networks supporting multimedia services

This paper illustrates the development of an analytical model for a communication network providing integrated services to a population of mobile users, and presents performance results to both validate the analytical approach, and assess the quality of the services offered to the end users. The analytical model is based on continuous-time multidimensional birth-death processes, 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 service, a data service with bit rate higher than the voice service, and a multimedia 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 transferring to the target cell only the voice component and suspending the data 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. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]