Estimation of performance measures for product form cellular mobile communications networks

This paper investigates cellular mobile communications networks. The purpose of the paper is twofold. First, it is shown that the restrictive assumption of reversible routing is not required for the network population distribution to be of product form. Different protocols with their specific ways of handling congestion, all of them yielding product form, are discussed. Second, the notoriously difficult task of obtaining performance measures derived from product form expressions is attacked by an efficient method based on importance sampling. This algorithm substantially speeds up the computational time required to estimate, for example, the probability that a call attempting a hand‐over is blocked. In addition, qualitative insight is gained into the network conditional on blocking in a specific cell: are neighbouring cells overloaded as well? The examples include networks with capacity constraints due to effective interference between cells, and a reasonably sized network containing 49 cells and 7 cell reuse groups.