An efficient method for loss performance modeling of hierarchical heterogeneous wireless networks

Loss performance modeling is important for the purpose of developing efficient dimensioning tools for large complicated networks. The performance modeling involves two challenging problems:(i) it is difficult to achieve in heterogeneous wireless networks, where different networks have different statistical characteristics in service and traffic models and (ii) capacity-constrained femto-macro overlay networks pose significant challenges due to the wide variety of bandwidth requirement of Internet services, the large number of femtocells overlaid by a macrocell, and the need for fast computations imposed by practical requirements of dynamic real-time resource allocation. This paper proposes a new computationally efficient numerical method for the loss probability approximation in hierarchical heterogeneous wireless networks. Verified by simulations, the performance and accuracy of the proposed numerical method is evaluated in a two-tier hierarchical cellular network and compared with an existing approximation method based on multidimensional Markov-modulated Poisson process. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.