Throughput metrics in beyond 3G wireless systems with complex rate variability and QoS

This paper studies throughput metrics for elastic traffic in a beyond 3G wireless system with QoS differentiation. We extend previous work by studying the capacity for elastic traffic subject to simultaneous variation due to the loading of higher priority traffic and the radio channel. The results yield novel insights that show: (i) load dependence in determining an optimal throughput metric, (ii) call-average throughput (thetasmacr) is not affected by the radio channel variability while flow-average (Phi) and the median throughputs, as well as the sojourn time are affected, and (iii) the proximity of thetasmacr to the median over a range of typical system loads (les0.7) confirms it as the best throughput estimator for elastic traffic, except at extreme loads (>0.85) where Phi and the median converge.