Mobility patterns in microcellular wireless networks

Author

Thajchayapong, S. ; Peha, J.M.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Volume

5

Issue

1

fYear

2006

Firstpage

52

Lastpage

63

Abstract

This study investigates mobility patterns in microcellular wireless networks, based on measurements from the 802.11 based system that blankets the Carnegie Mellon University campus. We characterize the distribution of dwell time, which is the length of time that a mobile device remains in a cell until the next handoff, and sign-on interarrival time, which is the length of time between successive sign-ons from the same mobile device. Many researchers have assumed that these distributions are exponential, but our results based on empirical analysis show that dwell time and sign-on interarrival time can be accurately described using heavy-tailed arithmetic distributions that have infinite mean and variance. We also show that the number of handoffs per sign-on can be modeled accurately with a heavy-tailed distribution.

Keywords

microcellular radio; 802.11 based systems; Carnegie Mellon University; dwell time distribution; empirical analysis; heavy-tailed arithmetic distributions; microcellular wireless networks; mobile device; mobility patterns; sign-on interarrival time; Analysis of variance; Analytical models; Arithmetic; Data analysis; Geometry; Intelligent networks; Pattern analysis; Performance analysis; Wireless application protocol; Wireless networks; Index Terms- Microcellular networks; and long-range dependence.; call interarrival time; dwell time; heavy-tailed distribution; mobility model; number of handoffs per sign-on;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1536-1233

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TMC.2006.13

Filename

1542016