Strategies for management of connection oriented data sessions employing the idle times in cellular telephony

We consider strategies for and performance of a class of connection-oriented data session services that might be supported using only the idle times between telephone calls on the channels of a cellular radio system. Two types of service are envisaged: a short transaction service and a suspendable data session service. We give expressions for the mean active and inactive times for data sessions and show how session assignment and displacement strategies can shape the distributions of session active and inactive times. We find useful amounts of capacity in the background of telephony systems even at high load, but in its raw form the opportunities for data transmission, and the data session suspension times implied, are rather large-grained for interactive data sessions. However, enforced time-sharing can improve these statistics for interactive data uses. With prioritized session assignment, a number of logical data sessions can be supported providing a range of service characteristics onto which interactive users, mobile fax, paging, navigation, and fleet tracking applications can be mapped in decreasing order of required session availability