Modeling Service Rates and Capacity for Mobile Communications in Heterogeneous Cellular Access Environments

Offloading setups in current cellular communications are meant for stationary usage modes in special places, such as in cafes, in offices, and at home. Beyond that, it is a well established but not necessarily implemented vision to support offloading when users are on the move. This is due to the fact that there are still unsolved issues, e.g., about breaks in fundamental assumptions and communication paradigms. For example, we can easily see from simulation studies that the service rate fluctuations that occur in such mobile offloading setups are far beyond what flow control mechanisms at transport layers and the adaptability of existing mobile applications can cope with. It is my aim to present stochastic models and simulation-based study results that describe the service rate fluctuations and the capacity of heterogeneous access systems. Factors that are taken into account are the user mobility, the application demand, and the layout of access deployments. Based on these results, I derive design requirements for mobile applications in order to maximize the user experience and in order to improve the overall system capacity. This includes including location-based applications and services.