A Performance Evaluation of Cellular/WLAN Integrated Networks

Abstract

One of the key issues in cellular networks is the traffic load imbalance problem in the form of hot-spots caused by the different user mobility levels. A sound approach to address the problem currently is the integration of different heterogeneous networks, such as constructing a system via connecting cellular network and wireless local area network (WLAN) seamlessly. In general, the traffic volume is significantly heavier in hot-spots of cellular networks and a higher data transferring rate can be provided by introducing WLAN so as to raise the utilization of the channel and achieve a good balance between user satisfaction and the efficiency of network. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the comprehensive performance of the systems both before and after the integration based upon an existing mathematical model, focusing on the quantitative analysis of changes in the performance of the system specially. In particular, the degree of improvement could be demonstrated precisely by calculation of several measure factors, i.e. call blocking probability and call dropping probability, and comparing with the ones calculated from a cellular-only network, and hence the efficiency and superiority of the integrated system is proved.