Performance of a Fixed Channel Allocation Scheme in a Motorway Environment

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of a fixed channel allocation scheme on a motorway. The impact of vehicular speed and the effects of allocating slots reserved exclusively for handover calls are investigated. Using vehicular traces from inductive loops on the M4 motorway in the UK, the impact of congestion due to lower vehicular speeds is simulated to show the impact on the communication layer. The simulation is then performed with varying number of slots reserved exclusively for handover calls. The considered area for the simulation consists of three contiguous base stations in a cellular network. The voice services considered use constant bit rate (CBR) data generation and has been modelled using a Poisson process with mean inter-arrival times and call duration periods generated for all vehicles independent of each other. The resulting degradation in the network performance in terms of blocked (call congestion) and dropped (handoff congestion) calls arising from the road congestion is evaluated.