Modeling user impatience and its impact on performance in mobile networks

We study in this work user impatience and quantify its impact on the performance of mobile networks, notably LTE networks, in the presence of data flows experiencing heterogeneous radio conditions. We consider a dynamic user setting where users come to the system at different time instants and leave it after a finite duration, either after completion of their data transfers or earlier, at the expiry of some patience duration. We derive closed-form analytical expressions for the system stationary probability distribution, in general and for some particular distributions for the impatience duration and file size, and obtain several performance metrics such as system load and mean transfer times, taking into account the heterogeneity of users locations in the cell. Our numerical results quantify these metrics, as a function of the impatience rate, as well as the traffic region where the impatience impact becomes preponderant.