TRAFFIC ENGINEERING OF THE RADIO INTERFACE FOR CELLULAR MOBILE NETWORKS

This paper reviews traffic-related issues in the operation of the radio interface in cellular mobile networks operating with FDMA, TDMA, or CDMA technology. The emphasis is on issues which affect the traffic performance of the network, rather than on transmission technology, or transmission quality measures such as bit error rate. We review the important traffic performance measures for cellular systems and the issues of channel assignment, handoff, access control, traffic modeling, and traffic management. Traffic modeling for all types of networks is considered in some depth, both by drawing analogies with fixed-wire networks, 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.