Handoff traffic distribution in cellular networks

Many aspects of handoff traffic analysis for third generation wireless communications networks are still not fully understood. In this paper, we study the handoff traffic distribution aspect in blocking and nonblocking environments under a general cell residence time (CRT). We use a gamma distribution for CRT to show that CRT affects the handoff traffic in both blocking and nonblocking environments. When the variance of CRT is large, the handoff traffic cannot be modeled by a Poisson process. In a blocking environment, the handoff arrival rate is affected by the CRT distribution, the lower the variance, the higher the handoff arrival rate. However, in a nonblocking environment, the handoff arrival rate is only affected by the mean value of CRT. We show that besides the variance of CRT, the new call traffic load, and users´ mobility, all affect the handoff traffic