A novel direction-based diurnal mobility model for handoff estimation in cellular networks

Abstract

In real-life scenario where users mostly know their destinations a priori, their movement is not purely random (as assumed in random walk model); rather it is somewhat direction-based and depends on the present location and the final destination. For instance, an office goer often returns home in the evening (i.e., mobility is diurnal). While no existing research has studied direction-based diurnal mobility model which could be of immense importance to cellular operators, we formulate a Markov model for such movement and give a theoretical upper bound of cell boundary crossings (i.e., expected number of handoffs) by the user. We have theoretically calculated the number of handoffs based on our proposed mobility model and verified the result in a simulated environment. We find that a majority of inter-RNC/MSC handoffs [4] comes from only a few cells which should be made dual-homed by the operators for their cost reduction.