Performance analysis of the 3G network with complementary WLANs

An analytical modeling method is developed for the evaluation of integrated 3G/WLAN networks. To adapt the feature of the emerging wireless networks efficiently and to cover many possible situations in reality, the cell residence times are modeled generally. The channel occupancy times, the horizontal and vertical handoff rates as well as some interesting performance measures are derived and calculated. Both analysis and numerical results show that the performance of the 3G network is significantly increased when the integrated 3G/WLAN network is employed, and that the performance of integrated 3G/WLAN network is improved greatly when the WLANs are in the hot-spot areas. The method developed here is expected to be useful for modeling and performance evaluation of other type of networks, such as the 3G network with the infrastructureless-mode WLANs or ad-hoc networks