Effect of the handoff area sojourn time distribution on the performance of cellular networks

In cellular systems there is usually an overlap cell coverage area (area covered by two or more base stations) which has valuable practical applications. Particularly, it permits the queuing of handover requests as a handover prioritization scheme. The modeling of the sojourn time in the overlap area is a topic which is not sufficiently explored, and even less is the effect it may have on the performance of prioritized channel assignment schemes based on handover queuing. In this paper we develop an analytical model for a cellular system with channel reservation for handovers and handoff queuing. In our model, the common assumption of exponentially distributed maximum queuing time is removed and a general distribution is allowed. The model is used to quantify the influence that the coefficient of variation of the overlap area sojourn time has on system performance. We also propose an approximate model that is more versatile and numerically more efficient than the exact model.