How mobility impacts the flow-level performance of wireless data systems

The potential for exploiting rate variations to increase the capacity of wireless systems by opportunistic scheduling has been extensively studied at packet level. In the present paper, we examine how slower, mobility-induced rate variations impact performance at flow level, accounting for the random number of flows sharing the transmission resource. We identify two limit regimes, termed fluid and quasistationary, where the rate variations occur on an infinitely fast and an infinitely slow time scale, respectively. Using stochastic comparison techniques, we show that these limit regimes provide simple performance bounds that only depend on easily calculated load factors. Additionally, we prove that for a broad class of fading processes, performance varies monotically with the speed of the rate variations. These results are illustrated through numerical experiments, showing that the fluid and quasistationary bounds are remarkably tight in certain usual cases