Effects of mobility on packet level performance of connection-oriented multimedia traffic over packet-switched cellular networks

Packet level metrics such as buffer overflow probability and packet delay are very important quality of service (QoS) parameters in future cellular mobile networks supporting packet-switched traffic. In this paper, we study the effects of user mobility on packet level performance of QoS provisioning schemes for connection-oriented multimedia traffic, which is modeled by a fluid model with on/off sources. We consider both the tradition mobility model, in which channel holding times for new and handoff calls are identically distributed, and a new mobility model proposed recently, in which they are exponentially distributed but with different average values. Using these models, we analyze the packet level performance, such as buffer overflow probability and packet average delay, of different QoS provisioning schemes. Using numerical examples, we show that user mobility models have significant impacts on the packet level performance. The discrepancy between the buffer overflow probabilities using different user mobility models can be as large as 20 times.