Modeling the hand-off problem in personal communications networks

A methodology based on multidimensional birth-death processes which can be used to devise reasonable and tractable analytical models for the hand-off problem is discussed. The approach is rich enough to permit representation of many factors, including a broad class of probability laws that describe the underlying driving processes such as: session holding times and platform mobility factors; platforms that support multiple calls; various priority-oriented schemes; both large and small user populations; and various access schemes, including FDMA, TDMA, CDMA (frequency-, time-, and code-division multiple-access), and mixtures. A more general formulation and some additional results are presented