The Effect of Mobility on the User-Level Fairness of a 3G Wireless Technology (EV-DO)

In this work the behavior of a 3G wireless technology is evaluated. The analysis is done using a simulation tool, based on the Tangram-II platform, which incorporates a detailed propagation model and the relevant features of the cdma20001x EVDO system. Internet access through Web browsers was judged to be the key application to be provided. We are interested in analyzing the throughput, latency and fairness metrics for several scenarios, including cases considering only static users as well as cases where a fraction of terminals has mobility. Our experiments show that the introduction of mobile users severely compromises the fairness in respect to user´s goodput and delay. A previous work of ours has shown that even if some parameters of the scheduling algorithm are varied, due to physical layer limitations it is difficult to improve performance of the technology with respect to fairness. In this article we show that the use of directional antennas can play an even more important role in improving EV-DO behavior for the envisioned application when some users are mobile.