Large effective call holding times for a PCS network

This paper addresses two important PCS cost and performance issues: (1) are blocking probabilities (for new call blocking, forced termination or call completion) appropriate for PCS network performance measurement? (2) Should PCS service providers offer discounts to phone calls that are force terminated? In order to do that we derive the effective call holding time distributions for complete/incomplete calls by using an analytic model. We assume that the cell residence times have a general distribution so that the measured data from the field trials, after a second order approximation, can be used to drive our model. Our study on the effective call holding time distributions indicates that (1) blocking probabilities do not provide sufficient information to evaluate the performance of a PCS network, and that output measures, such as expected effective call holding times for complete/incomplete calls, are desirable; (2) for a PCS network with moderate user mobility, the service provider can offer substantial discounts to incomplete calls (to increase the user satisfaction) without significantly reducing the profit margin. A quantitative analysis is also provided that can be used to determine the discount factor.