User mobility modeling and characterization of mobility patterns

TLDR

The study develops a mathematical formulation to systematically track the random movement of mobile stations in cellular environments. The model incorporates generalized mobility parameters, enabling characterization of cell residence time, channel holding time, and handover counts across diverse cellular environments. The analysis shows cell residence time follows a generalized gamma distribution, while channel holding time is well approximated by a negative exponential distribution.

Abstract

A mathematical formulation is developed for systematic tracking of the random movement of a mobile station in a cellular environment. It incorporates mobility parameters under the most generalized conditions, so that the model can be tailored to be applicable in most cellular environments. This mobility model is used to characterize different mobility-related traffic parameters in cellular systems. These include the distribution of the cell residence time of both new and handover calls, channel holding time, and the average number of handovers. It is shown that the cell residence time can be described by the generalized gamma distribution. It is also shown that the negative exponential distribution is a good approximation for describing the channel holding time.