User’s mobility effect on the performance of wireless cellular networks serving elastic traffic

The objective of the present paper is to give an analytic approximation of the performance of elastic traffic in wireless cellular networks accounting for user’s mobility. To do so we build a Markovian model for users arrivals, departures and mobility in such networks; which we call WET model. We firstly consider intracell mobility where each user is confined to remain within its serving cell. Then we consider the complete mobility where users may either move within each cell or make a handover (i.e. change to another cell). We propose to approximate the WET model by a Whittle one for which the performance is expressed analytically. We validate the approximation by simulating an OFDMA cellular network. We observe that the Whittle approximation underestimates the throughput per user of the WET model. Thus it may be used for a conservative dimensioning of the cellular networks. Moreover, when the traffic demand and the user speed are moderate, the Whittle approximation is good and thus leads to a precise dimensioning.