A Survey on Classical Teletraffic Models and Network Planning Issues for Cellular Telephony

Abstract

Research on traffic characterization and analysis of cellular networks has been very active in the past decades. However, it is difficult for networks planners to incorporate new results to network engineering. On the one hand, some models are very complex and need advanced programming and skills to be properly computed. On the other hand, reliability on those models is poor because there is a general lack of published field studies to corroborate them. This paper proposes simple well-known teletraffic models for cellular networks compared to the conventional Erlang-B frequently applied when a first estimate is needed. To this purpose, the latest results on the characterization of the arrival process and service time in cellular systems are reviewed. According to the arrival and service characteristics, three models are proposed to obtain a first approach to the performance characteristics of the cellular system. The first two models are extremely simple, allowing direct computation of performance through closed formulas, while the third requires simple programming.